


this city, our oeuvre

by pigeonsatdawn



Category: Purple Hyacinth - Ephemerys & Sophism (Webcomic)
Genre: (i like daughters so much can't you tell), Angst, Bittersweet Ending, Character Death, Cute Kids, F/M, Family Feels, Fluff, Post-Canon, Some Humor, Sorry in advanced, Spice, elle does NOT know how to write a nine year old, i genuinely don't know how to properly tag this, impromptu as always, it's just a mother storytelling the old days to her child, this city's gonna break my heart, this fic has everything istg
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-15
Updated: 2021-01-26
Packaged: 2021-03-12 16:35:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 23,430
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28763436
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pigeonsatdawn/pseuds/pigeonsatdawn
Summary: on the walls, in the streets, even among the constellations in the black expanse above they speak of our story.(it’s a story only the two of them could read. one day, she passes it on to their child.)
Relationships: Lauren Sinclair/Kieran White
Comments: 67
Kudos: 100





	1. the text

**Author's Note:**

> **nova** —  
> (n.) a star that shines so brightly for a moment, before fading back to its normal brightness  
> (name) origin: latin; meaning: new

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> heather: "pigeons and birbs poop wherever they want anyway", so here i am with another poop fic, un-proofread as always <3 hope you enjoy!

“It all started when he—well, he—” Lauren Sinclair sighs.

“Look, the first thing you have to know about him is that he wasn’t a good man.” She takes a pause to look at the surprised expression on her daughter’s face, and lets out a chuckle. “Oh, yeah. He was _terrible_. He was… he was one of those bad guys you read about in the papers, the bad guys who have now been locked up in prison, no longer terrorizing the streets of the city. Yeah, so of course, I hated him. Despised him. I mean, I was a cop, and he was an assassin—”

“What’s an assassin?” Nova Sinclair-White cuts off, dragging the word.

Lauren scratches the back of her head tentatively. “Well—assassins are these people who get paid for killing other people.”

“He—he _killed_ people?”

“… yeah. Yeah, he did.”

“But—you—then—how—why?” The nine year old spurts in stutters, mouth gaping open and close like a broken record.

She looks up to the cloudless sky where the moon shines its full glory, the light breeze of early spring blowing locks of her hair with a gentle touch. The stars seem to be winking at her, in the particularly benevolent mood to let a few sentiments slip by unnoticed.

She decides to take the infrequent offer.

“Are you sure you’re ready to know the whole story?” She casts a doubtful glance at her daughter.

“Well—you can’t just _not_ explain, after saying _that_!” her daughter exclaims in her elevated eagerness to know the long unspoken history. Lauren wonders whether she’s made her own conspiracy with the stars, deciding to press the dreaded question today of all nights.

She knows it’s bound to happen, but as she always has, Lauren Sinclair finds herself a guilty pleasure to delay the inevitable.

“I—”

Through her periphery, she registers the moon that watches them all too clearly without obstruction, and she knows she has run out of excuses to make.

A heavy sigh escapes her lips.

“It’s a fine weather for a stroll, don’t you think?”

* * *

“On one fine day nearing winter, when I was blissfully enjoying my free day off—”

“Mom, you should stop lying,” Nova chides. Apparently her ability to detect lies was passed on to her child. Lauren discovered this the first time Nova asked her about her father, which she brushed off with a lie, saying he was abroad for work. The child, still too young to understand precisely between truth and lie, was offended that her mother had lied to her, more than what the lie itself was about. She’d stormed off, and it took Lauren a while to get back into her good graces.

(And if he was there, he’d probably tease her about it, saying that their daughter was just about as stubborn as her mother. She wants to say that at times like these, she’s glad that he’s not around—but she can’t quite utter the lie.)

The next times Nova asked her about her father, Lauren would always circumvent around the conversation, or ignore it altogether with a sad smile. Nova is also much like her mother in the sense that she does not pry, even when she senses a problem. For that, Lauren appreciates, and uses it to her advantage to avoid the topic for as long as she can, justifying it to herself that she’ll tell her when she’s old enough to understand.

She reminds herself to be careful, to not let what happened to when she found out about her own parents be done to her own daughter. The least she could do is not repeat the same mistake.

Lauren throws a mock-annoyed glance at her, and sighs exaggeratedly. “Okay, okay. I wasn’t blissfully enjoying the day—I wasn’t quite the jubilant person.”

“Jubilant?”

“Joyful. Excited. Bright. I was none of those—back in the day, there was this group of bad guys—”

“The Phantom Scythe,” Nova chimes, proud to know _something_.

Lauren coos at her. “Right. The Phantom Scythe, they haunted my early years. So I was in my room, thinking of how to catch them and send them to jail for good, when I got a call. There’s been a murder nearby, and it was my job to attend to it as quick as possible and capture the murderer.”

“And it was my father.”

She glares at the kid. “I thought you wanted me to tell the story.”

“Meh, I thought it’d be a little more exciting.” Lauren gives her a deadpan look, and she grins. “Okay, this _is_ pretty exciting. What happened?”

Lauren rolls her eyes, but she continues. “So there had been a murder in that building,” she points to the very building the first murder had occurred. “A maid came out screaming, and we were attending to her, when suddenly…” her arm shifted to the left, “we heard a gunshot from there.”

“Ooh, double murder?”

At this, she narrows her eyes. “Why are you so excited that your father committed a double murder? Must I remind you how bad it is to take one’s life?”

“I mean, if _you_ of all people fell in love with him, he can’t be _that_ bad,” Nova reasons with little confidence, her head sinking into her turtleneck. “I mean, you hate everyone, even if they’re… good.”

“I don’t _hate everyone—_ ”

“Come on, Auntie Kym and Uncle Will have told me everything. They said you refused to date anyone because they’re way below your standards—”

“I did _not_ say that!” Lauren scoffs, making a mental reminder to berate her friends for spreading lies to her daughter. (Wait—did they believe in that fact? Otherwise Nova should’ve registered it as a lie… Lauren _really_ needs to talk with her friends one of these days.)

“—which is why you’re still single,” Nova concludes, ignoring her mother’s complaints. “They say the only person you ever really liked was my father, so he’s gotta be at least decent, right?”

Lauren’s expression melts to that of an awry smile. “Well you’re definitely much more understanding than I was,” she points out. “I treated him like how you’d imagine me treating, well, a murderer, but a hundred times worse.”

She doesn’t tell her daughter that her father isn’t just any murderer, that he’s an assassin a hundred times worse than all the others. Not yet.

“Anyway, that’s not until later. When we heard the gunshot, we started to head for the building, but then we saw the silhouette of a man running on those rooftops.”

“Is that like a shadow?” Nova inquires, and Lauren nods.

“I was quick to chase him, climbing my way up, he jumped down, and I followed, and chased him all the way to a dead end.”

Nova’s face brightened in delight. “So you caught him!”

“Eh, not so easily,” Lauren says with her head tilted sideways. “Your father was a good fighter, and he isn’t going to let himself get caught just like that. We sparred for a while, and at one point, he pinned me against the wall, using his sword to block me from moving.”

Nova’s audible gasp made Lauren want to laugh. “Glad you found it entertaining, at least,” she comments. “He hesitated, though, so I took the opportunity to fight him, and I finally had him pinned down.”

“I’m sensing there’s a ‘but’,” Nova declares with all the intellect in the world, and Lauren snaps her fingers.

“Indeed there is. First he tried to make a deal with me, to catch the Phantom Scythe with me. Which I thought was weird, of course, because _he_ was a Phantom Scythe assassin.”

“He’s with those group of bad guys?” Nova asks incredulously. “Mom—why do you even _like_ him?”

"I don’t,” she mutters under her breath. “And I was stupid, and desperate, so I heard him out. He somehow broke out of my handcuffs and held me at sword-point, but instead of killing me, he gave me a chance to think about the offer.”

“Why didn’t he kill you?”

“Yeah, at the time I wondered that too,” she tells her. “Apparently it’s because he doesn’t kill unless the Leader ordered him to, or unless it’s absolutely necessary.”

Nova ponders on this for a while. “Was he forced into being an assassin?”

Lauren gives her a tight lipped smile. She doesn’t give a response, instead beginning to walk. Nova follows quietly, apparently still waiting for an answer.

“He was,” she says at last, and she wonders whether Nova can hear the words, because she says nothing else.

Nonetheless, she is grateful; she doesn’t want to think further about _how_ he was forced into being an assassin. If Nova ever asks her about that, she doesn’t know how she will explain it to her. She doesn’t think she will ever be able to.

* * *

Lauren soon realizes that it’s hard to tell the story in chronological order if she is to refer to the locations according to the path they are taking.

Nonetheless, she tries: she says as they passes the APD building in the 11th precinct, “At one point, your father ended up working as a spy in the precinct, where _I_ worked.”

“How did _that_ happen?” Nova scrunches up her face in confusion. Lauren melts at the adorable expression.

“Well, a lot of things happened before then,” Lauren explains. “The main reason is that the previous spy they set in the precinct was murdered, so they needed a replacement. The other reason is that your father is tasked to kill—well, us.”

Nova’s little azure eyes widen. “Us?”

Lauren laughs. “Not you, kiddo. Me and your father. After that night where he offered the deal, I decided to accept it, and since then we’ve worked our way into slowly figuring out who the Leader is. Of course, it comes with its difficulties. Unfortunately, one of our obstacles was that the Leader wanted us dead. The other was that the captain of the precinct wanted us captured.”

“Oof, that must’ve been tricky.”

“Mhm,” Lauren hums. “We had to work in the middle of the night to get the investigation going. We went all over the city, hunting people and things. That bar over there is one where we caught one of the Phantom Scythe members and sent them to jail. Anonymously, of course.” She points to the Golden Clover, where they had caught Harry Anslow.

Nova watches as Lauren’s eyes linger on the building a little longer than she should. “Was he a good partner?”

The corners of Lauren’s mouth twitches. “Most of the time. Unfortunately, your father has a penchant for arguing with every little thing I say, and I hate backing down from an argument, no matter how petty.”

“Sounds a lot like you,” Nova mutters, and Lauren glares at her.

“He was a good dancer, I’ll give him that.”

“Ooh, you danced together?”

A small lopsided smile graces Lauren’s lips. “We had to be in disguise. You know, to be anonymous. So we acted like the bar’s guests and tangoed in there. Even though I hated him immensely at the time, even I couldn’t deny that your father was one charming man.” She turns to look at her daughter with her dark hair and blue eyes, and proceeds to stroke her head. “It’s honestly thanks to him that you grew up to be so beautiful.”

Rose floods the little girl’s cheeks, and she purses her lips. “If only I could see what Auntie Kym means when they say I look so much like my father.”

Lauren pats her head one more time, before continuing to walk down the street. “For now, just know you do,” she reassures. Perhaps she can find some photographs of him to show her. “Yeah, some times, your father cleans up well. Other times, he can be pretty scary.”

That, of course, is an understatement. But Lauren isn’t quite in the mood to describe the way he looks with blood smeared on his face when he killed that man for her on the rooftop, nor the way he dripped with sweat and murderous intent in the cave as he lashed out at her for calling him a monster.

“He is an assassin after all,” Nova shrugs. “Of course he can be scary.”

Lauren thinks it’s ironic that even her nine-year-old child can keep in mind that he’s an assassin, when she all but forgot and put her complete trust in him upon one instance of him being a decent person.

Then again, Nova hasn’t _seen_ Kieran White in his barest, stripped of all the terrors and tragedies brought upon his life. She wishes she could show the sight to her, but alas.

She regards her statement with a tight-lipped smile, and treads onwards.

* * *

While they head for the direction of the river, Lauren tells her, “Your father was a weird man. He, well, he owned a cave.”

“A _cave_?” Nova asks, not believing her ears.

Lauren hums, in deep agreement with her reaction. “It was our headquarters for a while. It’s basically where he lived his life as an assassin: he had a rack of blades that was pretty noteworthy—did I mention he exclusively used blades?—we often sparred in the training circle he had, and he also had this info board with all the information he’d collected of the PS members over the years.”

Nova skips her way to stop her mother from walking further. “Can we _pleeeease_ see the cave? I wanna see what it looks like!”

Lauren stares at her blankly. “Well, no. First, because it’s far over there, and it’s dangerous. But also, because I hate that place.”

“Whyyyyy?” Nova whines, pouting with her arms crossed. “I’m nine, I’m old enough.”

Lauren pinches her cheek, shaking it back and forth. “No, you’re not. And I hate it, because it’s home to one of my worst memories of him. So no, we’re not going there.”

Hearing this, her daughter’s face shifts to an expression more solemn. “What happened?”

Lauren sighs. “We had a huge fight, basically. It was a few days before he got appointed to work in the precinct. We kind of overstepped the grounds of our deal, and it blew up, and we didn’t talk to each other for a while.”

“Aww. How did you reconcile?”

Lauren makes a turn, entering the narrow streets. “I—well first, we were forced to work together, because we were the only ones who were kind of dealing with this whole situation. The PS had dangerous plans, and we had to stop them. We tried doing it alone, but we only got in the way of each other, so we agreed to set aside our animosity for each other and deal with this professionally.”

“Look how _that_ turned out.”

Lauren places a hand on her hips, halting in her tracks. “Who taught you to be this sarcastic, young lady?”

“Probably you, old lady.”

“Hey!” The sound of Nova’s laughter melts Lauren’s anger as soon as it surfaces, and she resumes her storytelling. “You’re not wrong, though. We _tried_ to be professional, but like the first time around, we failed spectacularly.”

“Because you’re in _looooove_ ,” the girl teases, and Lauren rolls her eyes, but she doesn’t refute the statement.

“It’s not just falling straight into love, little kid,” she informs her daughter. “It took extra hard work for us to understand each other first, as human to human, and then a sense of camaraderie—”

“What word is _that_?” The look on Nova’s face resembles that of her tasting something bitter, and Lauren cannot help but laugh.

“Comradeship. Uh, some type of friendship, basically. We learned to be civil, first and foremost, because before that we always attacked each other whenever one of us said something that isn’t even harmful to begin with.”

“You two sound like kids.”

Lauren mutters under her breath, “I can’t even argue with that.”

Her steps slow down as they reach a certain residential street, reminiscence glazing her golden orbs. Facing her daughter, she points at one of the apartment buildings. “This used to be where he lived.”

“Does he… not live there anymore?”

“If he was that easy to find, why would I even not let you see him for your entire life?” Lauren snorts, before relapsing into solemnity. “This place holds a lot of the better memories we had together, ones that make me realize that, maybe he’s not so bad of a person after all. Maybe he’s a bit more human than I, or even he, realized.”

She walks towards the steps to his apartment and sits on it. Nova asks, “Uh, is it okay for us to be here?”

Lauren gives her a smile, eyes crinkling. “He’s not here, but everything inside is untouched. No one lives here now.”

“So it’s still his house, technically?” Nova takes a seat next to Lauren.

She shrugs. “You could say that.”

“Have you ever tried breaking in—”

“Who taught you to be a criminal?”

“You said my father was a criminal—”

“Granted,” Lauren mutters under her breath, “I suppose the rebellious streak runs in the blood. And honey, I’m a cop, I’m not supposed to break into people’s property—”

“Uh, you were just talking about all the ways you broke the law with—”

“Okay, maybe it’s also from my blood.” She glares at her daughter, who grins at her cheekily. She then shakes her head. “This cheekiness, though, is definitely his. But yeah, I went in the apartment once, to see if he’d left anything behind, a trace, anything. Of course, I found nothing.”

“Aw, dang,” Nova whines, and Lauren proceeds to pinch her cheeks. “Ow, mom!”

“You’re adorable,” she simply explains, before facing the river once more. “The first time he brought me here, he tended to my wounds, and even let me sleep overnight because it was too dangerous to walk back home alone.”

“Did you guys have sex?”

Lauren bursts into a coughing fit at the sudden accusation. “Nova, _god_ , you–you’re _nine_ , who on earth taught you that word?”

The nine-year-old merely rolls her eyes. “It’s a three letter word that’s pretty easy to remember, mom.”

“Is it Kym?”

“Yes, it’s Auntie Kym,” she mutters.

Lauren curses under her breath, though she should’ve been more careful, because _of course_ Nova would parrot that too: “Shit?”

“No—ignore that,” the mother says frantically, biting her tongue. “You shouldn’t play too much with Kym from now on. Damn that woman.”

“But did you have sex with him?”

Lauren blushes furiously. “No, I did not!” she yelps, pretty sure her voice can be heard from the neighboring precincts. “I hated him—why would I—never mind, we shouldn’t even be talking about this.”

The puppy eyes Nova gives her unnerves her for some reason. The kid knows way too much for her age. “But why shouldn’t we? After all, if I exist, you two _must’ve_ had sex at one point.”

“My _god_ ,” Lauren curses in frustration, “I need to have a word with Kym immediately.”

“Oh, no, that was Uncle Will.”

“ _William?_ ” Lauren shrieks, unable to contain her exasperation. “How did _William_ of all people—”

“Nah, he kinda let it slip, I just connected the dots,” Nova tells her matter-of-factly.

At this point, Lauren can only sigh. Eventually she gives in: “I mean, of course, we slept together when I conceived you. But not on my first night here. That was even before the cave incident, and long before, well, what happened.”

“See, you could’ve just said that,” Nova shrugs, and Lauren glares at her. _The nerve of this child—_ She is reminded again of her father, who had just about as much of a spine as she does.

When Nova has finally seem to cease the teasing mood, Lauren speaks up much more gently: “It’s also in here where I realized for the first time that I… well… I liked him. You know, in a more than platonic way.”

“What’s platonic? Isn’t that the thing that causes earthquakes?”

“Uh, I think you’re talking about plate tectonics, dear. Platonic is basically non-romantic, like a friend relationship.” Under her breath, Lauren adds, “How do you even know the term plate tectonics?”

“School, mom,” she scowls. “And, how did you realize you liked him?”

“He—” Lauren couldn’t resist the genuine smile that grows on her face. “He was a brilliant artist.”

“He draws?”

Lauren nods. “And he does it to keep his humanity intact. You know, because he’s forced into, well, being a murderer.” She clears her throat. “He drew a lot of things, mainly people and their expressions.”

“And he definitely drew you.”

“Yeah.” Lauren’s voice comes out as a whisper, a cloud in the winter night. “I mean, of course I didn’t like him just because he drew me. But I— _god_ , I don’t know, it just made me realize how much he was suffering, you know? How much he’s actually _trying_ to—trying to be human, even when I keep deeming him a–a _monster_ , for being a murderer.” She then realizes that her eyes have begun to sting from the tears, the cold making it all the more unbearable. She wipes it off with the back of her hand, hoping her daughter does not notice.

But Nova, like her father, is particularly perceptive. On the other hand, like her mother, she does not push the issue, sensing that Lauren does not want to talk about it.

The little rascal jokes instead: “So when you realize, did you kiss dramatically and end up having sex?”

Lauren blinks several times, astounded upon the words coming out of her child’s mouth. “What the _hell_ have Kym and Will been telling you?” she blurts. “Nothing happened, alright? I realized it, and I went home.”

“You didn’t even tell him?”

Lauren shakes her head, chuckling a little. “Not even when we ended up making love. That— _god_ , I can’t believe I’m talking to _you_ of all people about this—that was so messy, so unplanned. I’m not even sure how it happened. It’s really not the kind of romantic you might be expecting.”

“So I wasn’t supposed to be born?” Nova questions, but not with hostility.

Lauren nods hesitantly. “Not that I don’t want you, mind you—but I definitely hadn’t seen you coming. Or that whole thing, for the matter. It just happened—we were both quite frustrated and desperate because _nothing_ seemed to be going right for us. And we were like, 90% sure we were going to die soon. And we only had each other.”

(It was more like, they were always with each other, and they were going _crazy_ upon pretending they didn’t just want to pin the other down right then and there. Lauren Sinclair wouldn’t ever attest to that for the life of her, even if it meant that she would die the very next day.)

“Mom,” Nova calls quietly, taking her by surprise at how tender her voice sounds. She hums in response, turning to look at her.

“You could’ve abandoned me,” she whispers, and the words pierce Lauren’s heart like invisible swords, front and back. “You could’ve let someone else take care of me. Why didn’t you?”

“Why—” Lauren finds her throat clogged, and she chokes on the words. “Why do you think I would ever abandon you?”

Nova smiles, but the glimmer in her ocean eyes is so melancholy, it reminds her of Kieran White. “You think I don’t notice, but I know my existence brings you pain. I know it hurts for you to even see me.”

It’s in Lauren’s nature to argue, and she has so much rebuttals to bring to her. But—

She wants to argue that, no, it doesn’t hurt to see her daughter, of course not, but that’s a lie, because it hurts way too much.

She wants to at least explain why she can’t do that, listing the numerous reasons behind her decision: because Kieran White himself had been an abandoned child; because she was the last thing that belonged to him that she could ever hold on to; because even if she hadn’t been born yet, Lauren felt as if she deserved to have her—both as the curse to her recklessness and the blessing to her acquiescence—

But she couldn’t seem to find the voice to say the words, nor could she bring her eyes to her daughters to even say it. Her clenched teeth grind against each other to the point she feels numb.

At last, she confesses only the most general truth:

“It would only hurt more if I do.”

* * *

The moment she sets a foot on the bridge connecting the southern and northern lands of the city, Nova asks, “Are we crossing over?”

Lauren looks back at her, giving her a reassuring smile. “No, we’re not. Just… this bridge. It’s where we first shook on the deal.”

“Ooh,” the kid muses, falling in harmony to her mother’s footsteps next to her. “Why here?”

Shrugging, she admits, “I don’t know. Maybe because it’s a pretty view.” She juts her chin to the railing on the opposite side. “He stood on the railing and danced around there. In case you haven’t realized, your father has an odd flair for the dramatics. When we shook on the deal, we sliced our palms—again, his idea—with blades, literally bound in blood.”

Nova makes an expression of disgust. “Isn’t that gross?”

“Again, he was quite the weird man. Anyways, this bridge is kind of our designated rendezvous point, where we meet and separate for most of our infiltrations.”

Nova nods slowly in understanding, taking in the lamp lit view of the cityscape, spreading out the extensive length of the river. For a while, they walked in silence, and Lauren immerses herself in the memories.

“And this…” Her steps slow down to a halt near the rail of the bridge.

“This is where he left for the last time.”

Nova stares at her with beaded eyes, not quite understanding. “B–but— but why did he leave?”

Lauren let out a small scoff. “I don’t know,” she says humorlessly, “he never told me what happened. We were fugitives, yet I was so— _mad_ , I started screaming at him in the quiet night without minding who could hear us, telling him to stay. I _begged_ him to stay, not to leave me alone. But in the end, I had to let go.” Her heart clenches at the memory, and she finds that she lacks the energy to stand still for much longer, so she allows her body to drop to the pavement. Nova sits next to her, her acts a little more graceful than her mother’s.

“He—he told me he was tired. So—” Lauren breathes in, her chest shuddering. It takes her everything not to break down then and there; it has been a _decade_ , after all, and she should… she should know better than to cry over a mere memory. “He told me to let him rest. So I–I gave him the peace he needed.”

She clenches her fists, but keeps her chin high, staring ahead at the river splitting the two lands. One where he comes from, and the other, she. Letting her tears fall will only give the gods more satisfaction upon watching her succumb to their cursed fate. She keeps her eyes pried open, even if they sting.

In the middle of it all is tethered the innocent child, who asks: “Is he not in peace when he’s with you?”

Lauren shakes her head with much effort, unable to face her daughter. “We were living reminders to each other of our own tragedies. Whatever moment of calm we do feel is always short-lived; it was only about time until someone comes along crashing reality over our heads.”

“Then why did you beg for him to stay?”

“I…” Fingernails dig into the palm of her hand, teeth into the flesh of her lips. “I wanted more time. I was in denial. Your father was always the quicker one of us to see the truth and accept reality. I hated it. I hated him.”

It falls silent for a while. Lauren turns to look at Nova, wondering what she could be thinking about. It’s at times like these where she sees the shadows of him in her, and she forces herself to look away. The last thing she needs tonight, while she’s out with her daughter, is to cry over her last living memory of him. She’s cried about it enough, she thinks.

She thinks she might as well have been looking at him, those very same cobalt orbs in her daughter’s eyes glinting as she asks, “Did you ever tell him you loved him?”

In the few seconds of pause, Lauren doesn’t breathe. She shakes her head in broken swings. “It would’ve been—” She sniffles, and when she realizes, she laughs it off with a slight chuckle. “It would’ve been too hard for the both of us.”

“Maybe he wouldn’t have left if you said it,” Nova ponders with a pout.

Lauren only laughs with delirious mirth. “The bastard had the nerve to confess to me as he was about to leave, in the middle of all my screaming. He could’ve lied, he could’ve made me mad instead, so that it was easier to accept it, but _no_ , he had to tell me he loved me at the very end. Your father was a massive jerk, and I hated him with my entire heart.”

Incredulously, her daughter whines, “Why would he leave if he loves you?”

Sighing, Lauren stood up, brushing dust off her coat. “We didn’t really have a choice.” With a wry smile, she extends a hand to her daughter, and Nova takes it with her little hand, lifting herself up. “Come on, let’s not wallow further over your idiot of a father. He’s never gonna be around to answer our questions anyway, so we might as well move on with our lives.”

Even as she says that— she knows she will never be able to move on from him, not anytime soon. Not until she sees him again.

She starts walking, but is pulled back by her daughter, who stands still on her spot. “Does… does he know about… about me?”

Her heart might as well have been flattened by a hammer. She croaks, “I found out after—after he left.”

“Would he—would he have wanted to meet me?”

And this she says with certainty: “Of course. Of course he would have. Kieran White would’ve loved you, so, so much more than I could ever love you.”

_And for that—_

_for that, I am eternally sorry._

_Sorry, to the both of you._

* * *

In the late hour, the shops on the streets have begun to close. There is little light peeking through the curtains of the windows of the apartment buildings, but aside of that and from the street lamps, they depend solely on the moon to make their way. 

Lauren almost misses the café around the corner, with its lights already off, blending with the dark. Even as she acknowledges it, though, she does so with a slight discrepancy, as the memory of them in the very café was never hers to begin with.

She thinks he’ll be honored if their child knows about it, anyway. “I said earlier that I first met your father in that dead end, but he would’ve told you that this cafe was the first time we met.”

“Huh?” Nova swings her head between the closed shop and her mother. “How does that work?”

“Your father is a stalker.”

She looks at her mother unamused. “You forget I can hear lies, too.”

“Man, now I know what he must’ve felt like,” Lauren mutters. “Okay, yeah, no, but we were both in the same café during the evening of the double murder. He noticed me; I made quite a scene in there.”

“Oooh, what if it was love at first sight?” Nova bounces giddily, her grin brighter than the stars above. Lauren smiles at the sight, but it falls just as fast.

Her daughter notices. “Do you hate the idea?”

Lauren shakes her head. “Not that I hate it. But life—well, ours, at least—isn’t that much of a fairytale. An assassin doesn’t just fall in love with a cop and repent and everything gets solved. As I’ve said, there’s a reason your father isn’t here with us right now.”

Nova, curious as she is, decides not to pry. “Mom? Your story might not be a fairytale, but it sure does make for a great story for a fiction book.”

“You think so?” Lauren chuckles, fondly patting her head.

Nova nods under her palm. “I wish it was fiction,” she says earnestly.

“Why?”

“I imagine it’ll hurt less than if it’s real.”

Lauren stares at her daughter in slight admiration. Nova rarely speaks of Lauren being in pain, even if she sees it, so it surprises her a little to see that it does hurt for the child to see her mother in pain.

“Well, I’m glad that it _isn’t_ fiction,” Lauren tells her otherwise.

“Huh?”

“All the pain has brought me you.” The words come out barely a breath, her having lost the ability to vocalize them. “Your existence, Nova, is worth all the pain in the world, and more.”

And Nova doesn’t expect to be crying tonight, but the rawness of her mother’s emotions makes her little heart clench. She tries to hold it back, knowing that her crying will make her mother cry as well—but she fails, and almost immediately, tears pour down her face in silent streams.

And of course, a few tears escape Lauren’s eyes. They are similar in that way, not wanting the other to see them sob, and so she pulls her daughter into her embrace, burying her face in her chest, pressing her lips heavily so as to not let out a broken whimper.

“I love you, Mom,” Nova mumbles against her mother, the tears soaking into her shirt.

“And I love you _so much_.”

Sniffling, Nova lets her eyelids fall, her heart beat slowly falling back to equilibrium upon the steady rhythm of her mother’s breathing.

She allows herself to pray to the stars, wishing that even if she doesn’t speak, she might be heard:

She prays that one day, she can meet her father, no matter how long it takes.

* * *

Their trip down memory lane ends in tranquil. The two pair of footsteps arrive back at the Sinclair’s Manor without harm, a few minutes before midnight, the beginning of a new day. Lauren’s hand is already reaching for the doorknob, when Nova decides to ask, before they head back into the present: 

“You still love him, don’t you?”

Lauren turns around to face her daughter. She stares into the sky, absorbing in the immeasurable amount of stars scattered throughout the obsidian night. With the corners of her mouth quivering slightly, she breathes out, “Unfortunately so.”

“Mom—why do you keep staring at the sky?”

She looks at her daughter in surprise. She hasn’t even realized she’s been doing that, too absorbed in her own memories to notice. Then, she grins. “Back in the day, we called ourselves ‘Lune’. You know, for the moon. So when I miss him, I just have to look at the moon.”

“Aww, you guys have a couple name? That is soooo cheesy!” Lauren joins her daughter in blissful laughter, even if nothing about Lune had been cute. It doesn’t take long before she cranes her head back once more, facing the infinite universe that lies above. Her grin falters ever so slightly.

“And who knows?” Her voice sinks into a whisper, trading a secret of her own with the moon. “He might be watching us with a tender smile.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this started off as writing practice (i found out i didn't have writer's block i just didn't want to write my wips) but anyways 
> 
> please don't kill me i thought it was cute for lauren to storytell to her child about how she and kieran came about to be, there wasn't supposed to be tears, but here we are  
> (the last line? what last line it means nothing it's just poetic)
> 
> but also if you ask why i made a new child instead of using the official fanon child: i have no good explanation other than, uh, i do what i want? idk
> 
> ye anyways, thank you for reading, kudos and comments would be lovely! ❤️❤️ hope you all have a great weekend!


	2. the context

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> plenty is left out from the tragedy that befell the two.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warnings: references to 43, 73, 78 and mentions of abuse throughout, appendix c is a sex scene, appendix d is a death scene, appendix e is a stressful mental breakdown  
> a less important warning: bad and really inconsistent writing. sorry in advanced 💔
> 
> and an obligatory warning, due to past cases of “fraud and deceit” (i can argue with you all day that i have never outright lied, i adopt kieran’s half-truth abilities) and upon popular request: yes, this one is quite angsty i suppose, so read at your own discretion
> 
> enough with my ramblings, now begin your slow descent down the most cliché tragedy i will ever write. (cliché, and yet it hurts all the same.)

** Appendix A: Purple Hyacinth; assassin **

Reference material(s):

> _“He—he_ killed _people?”_
> 
> _“… yeah. Yeah, he did.”_
> 
> [section 0.5–6]
> 
> _“They say the only person you ever really liked was my father, so he’s gotta be at least decent, right?”_
> 
> _Lauren’s expression melts to that of an awry smile. “Well you’re definitely much more understanding than I was,” she points out. “I treated him like how you’d imagine me treating, well, a murderer, but a hundred times worse.”_
> 
> [section 1.21–22]
> 
> _“If only I could see what Auntie Kym means when they say I look so much like my father.”_
> 
> _Lauren pats her head one more time, before continuing to walk down the street. “For now, just know you do,” she reassures. Perhaps she can find some photographs of him to show her. “Yeah, some times, your father cleans up well. Other times, he can be pretty scary.”_
> 
> [section 2.15–16]
> 
> _“Can we_ pleeeease _see the cave? I wanna see what it looks like!”_
> 
> _Lauren stares at her blankly. “Well, no. First, because it’s far over there, and it’s dangerous. But also, because I hate that place.”_
> 
> _“Whyyyyy?” Nova whines, pouting with her arms crossed. “I’m nine, I’m old enough.”_
> 
> _Lauren pinches her cheek, shaking it back and forth. “No, you’re not. And I hate it, because it’s home to one of my worst memories of him. So no, we’re not going there.”_
> 
> [section 3.4–7]

—

In the beginning, it was Lauren Sinclair against the Purple Hyacinth.

It was a duel between the gods’ personal handpicks when it comes to stubbornness, straight from either side of the border. With a common ambition (fuelled by a little desperation), it became a deal struck under moonlight, a coalition of the most gallant—or perhaps just the foolhardy, but they had their reasons.

True to his words, Lauren Sinclair was a cop too crooked to team up with the assassin. That, at least, she must claim to be true.

But Lauren was always particularly gifted in intellect; she did not come to the controversial partnership without preparation. She kept her expectations for the assassin beyond rock bottom, never coming to meet him empty handed, always seeing him as this murder machine who killed without relent. For a while, it worked—for a while, as a team, they were indestructible; two of the most headstrong combined, one with a river of resources to get the investigation started, and the other keeping it going with her lie detection abilities.

It was a duo bound to win, a pair so driven by desperation and trauma.

Eventually, though, the core of their fight against the Phantom Scythe was personal—and that very fact made it hard to keep things professional in their little team of two. Everything they were, everything they’d become, all branched out the way it did because of what the Phantom Scythe had done to them—and so when Lauren learned of this, she couldn’t quite see him as mutually exclusive, _apart_ from him, not when she _understood_. Despite being quite prejudiced herself, Lauren was always the empathetic woman, having a heart for those who knew pain, because she, too, had been there.

So she made the mistake of singling out on that side of him that was—well, _least_ monstrous. When she patched him up, she saw the scars that he refused to speak of, yet she knew. She heard his half-truths regarding his decision to be an assassin, and though she never asked, she knew that his reasons weren’t as vile as the stereotypical assassin’s. When he broke _his_ laws for _her_ , she knew she meant more to him than just an investment, and when he tended to her wounds and offered her hospitality, she saw—she saw a sliver of care in him.

The misconception of the tale? That the Purple Hyacinth vanished the moment he decided to act human.

When positioned against each other, the image of him resembling that which was somewhat… human, and the monster that was anything but, was too in contrast that the effect pierced her like a double edged sword. She forgot that the assassin _killed_ —a foolish mistake. She let herself rage over it and stormed into _his_ territory—a careless feat. She screamed at him the truth—because Lauren Sinclair was the beholder of all things true—

She was not to blame for this, and yet she faced the brunt of her actions: simply putting her belief in the wrong place. He violated her personal space in response, and reminded her of what he could do, setting her in deep-rooted fear. And perhaps she needed the reminder, but it was too harsh to even be considered human, and she knew. Now she knew for sure—now she wouldn’t forget, that in the end, he was a monster.

In the end, he was still the Purple Hyacinth. It was the reason for all his victories and misfortunes—but most of all: it was the start and the end of the tragedy they shared.

People tend to forget that. So did Lauren Sinclair, for the longest time.

* * *

** Appendix B: Kieran White; human **

Reference material(s):

> _“Was he forced into being an assassin?”_
> 
> _Lauren gives her a tight lipped smile. She doesn’t give a response, instead beginning to walk. Nova follows quietly, apparently still waiting for an answer._
> 
> _“He was,” she says at last, and she wonders whether Nova can hear the words, because she says nothing else._
> 
> [section 1.36–38]
> 
> _Lauren nods. “And he does it to keep his humanity intact. You know, because he’s forced into, well, being a murderer.” She clears her throat. “He drew a lot of things, mainly people and their expressions.”_
> 
> _“And he definitely drew you.”_
> 
> _“Yeah.” Lauren’s voice comes out as a whisper, a cloud in the winter night. “I mean, of course I didn’t like him just because he drew me. But I—_ god _, I don’t know, it just made me realize how much he was suffering, you know? How much he’s actually_ trying _to—trying to be human, even when I keep deeming him a–a_ monster _, for being a murderer.”_
> 
> [section 3.59–61]

—

Lauren Sinclair and Kieran White made their way back to the 11th precinct, walking side by side at such a regular pace, you’d think they’d just gone home from a date. The fact was simply that they’d returned from an uneventful stakeout, and they’d been feeling growingly tired and hopeless from the lack of new information in their investigations, and their time was drawing close to the end.

They were walking by the bridge by the border of the 10th and 11th precincts when they saw, through the blunt dark that enveloped the south of the bridge, a teenage boy staggering through like he was being chased. He collapsed on the ground just briefly, before he picked himself up again, only to fall again once he reached the northern ground. He let out a muffled groan, but the still winds picked up his voice and carried it through the silent night with enhanced volume. When Lauren saw the boy, she instinctively held out a hand to grip Kieran’s arm, only to notice that he’d stopped walking a while ago, eyes trained at the same scene. He wasn’t quite as alarmed as she was.

“Kieran, we’ve got to—” her voice faltered at his gaze, which wasn’t even aimed at her. “We’ve got to help him.”

It took a while for him to respond. Eventually, he relaxed his taut jaw and said, “There’s no use helping him. He’s one of their recruits.”

Lauren blinked. “Oh,” she said dumbfounded, but she looked at the boy once more as he struggled with what seemed like a dislocated arm and a broken knee. “How—how are you sure?”

“Nobody cares about the orphans,” he told her more quietly, before turning and resuming the walk, Lauren following closely behind. “You don’t usually see orphans past the age of thirteen, because they either died of starvation, or they’ve been recruited by the Phantom Scythe. They’re also the reason he’s injured; the cops don’t beat up the orphans if they don’t need to, and they’re not usually that gruesome.”

She remembered him briefly mentioning about the orphans on their trips to Greychapel, and his insinuation on being one of the “lucky” kids, but she didn’t ask. More than ready to drop the topic, she was surprised yet again to see that Kieran had stopped, again, his head slightly angled to the direction of the bridge, like he wanted to look but couldn’t quite bring himself to.

Lauren gave him a questioning look, and he glanced at her, his blue orbs wide in… pensiveness. She had rarely seen him so serious before, and to say she was simply curious was an understatement—and while curiosity had surely gotten her into terrible situations before, at the moment there was nothing more she wanted to do than to crack his mind open and figure what he might be thinking, or _feeling_.

He looked back at the child—and he turned, heading for his direction. Not entirely sure herself _why_ he was acting this way, Lauren simply followed along, having her conscience slightly eased knowing they won’t be leaving an injured and possibly dying child behind.

“I thought you said—he was a PS recruit. Are you sure about this?” she asked anyway, having an inkling that Kieran wasn’t in his most rational mind at the moment. If they slip up and reveal their identity to the boy… he could definitely use it to his advantage somehow, and Lauren didn’t want to risk that.

“And here I thought as a cop you wouldn’t want to be leaving someone out there to die,” Kieran tried to muster as much snark as he could, but it would’ve sounded forced to whoever heard it. “In the very precinct you work in, no less.”

“You know what I mean,” she muttered.

They approached the kid, who was bending on the ground, his right hand clutching his left shoulder, dressed in ragged fabric that could barely be described as clothing.

Kieran stood for a while, seemingly scrutinizing the poor boy, as he stared back at him with wide, pained eyes. Lauren couldn’t tell either what the boy was feeling, other than pain itself; she wondered whether he’d wanted to be helped at all.

Nevertheless, Kieran bent to his side and put an arm around his back. The boy slung his right arm over Kieran’s back to support himself, standing up with exaggerated effort. And Lauren—well, Lauren had been planning to go home, shower up, and try another futile attempt to get a good night’s sleep, but she supposed she could be doing other, more productive things. So she grabbed the boy by his left arm, hoping that it would ease his shoulder pain by a little, as the three began to make their way to Kieran’s apartment to get the boy treated. The trip was short in distance, yet the unbearable silence made it feel like they circled the city of Ardhalis thrice, and the minute they got to his doorstep Lauren let out a large exhale of relief.

“You…” the boy croaked out, and the two adults’ heads whipped over to him immediately. “You don’t have to help me. I’m sorry for ruining your night.”

Lauren, always filled to the brim with pity, gave him a reassuring smile. “You didn’t ruin our night, don’t worry. We wanted to help, anyways.” She gave a nervous look at Kieran, wishing he’d take control—after all, he’d always been the better actor between the two. However, he kept his mouth shut, proceeding to take out his keys to unlock the door, opening it without a word.

_Strange_.

With a final effort, they hauled the boy in and dropped him on a stool, before Kieran wordlessly headed to the bathroom to retrieve the first aid kit. Lauren gave the boy a sheepish look. “I’m sorry about him, he’s just… really strange. Are you alright?”

It was probably the dumbest question ever asked in the history of dumb questions, but perhaps because they’d offered him hospitality when he needed it the most, the boy didn’t point that out. Instead, he kept his head ducked low until Kieran came back with the first aid kit, setting it down on the kitchen table. His hands went flying around, moving at a pace faster than Lauren could comprehend, and had begun dabbing the blood away from his face when she said: “Let me do it.”

Kieran merely shook his head. Then, “You should go home.”

It shook her a bit to hear him say it so seriously, when he’d always been so snarky to her. “Let me help,” she insisted, feeling like it was the least she could do.

“They’ll be looking for you,” he reminded, but she didn’t budge. In their moment of tension, the boy spoke up, “Are you not… like, living together?”

Lauren began coughing from her seat, but Kieran—whom she thought would’ve taken the opportunity to tease her about it in some way, remained silent, continuing to clean his wounds. Again she was left to fend for herself, so she replied between her stutters: “Uh, no, um, we’re just—work partners. Yeah, that’s all.”

“Huh,” the boy pondered. “Would’ve thought otherwise.”

Lauren caught Kieran giving her a side eyed glance, but in a split second it was gone, and she wondered whether she’d just been imagining it. She shook her head, walking over to the chair across the table and sitting down on it. She watched as Kieran tended up to his wounds with just as much dexterity and gentleness as he did to hers the first time she’d been there, and again she was curious of how often before did he have to tend to his own wounds, whether _anyone_ had been there to help him with his pain, and she felt that pang of pity again.

Just as quickly, she was reminded of the own bruises he’d inflicted on her, and wondered whether he even felt pain at all. Lest she ever forget, unfortunately.

After an extended period of excruciating silence, the boy asked, “Are you not going to… ask?”

Lauren waited, staring at Kieran. Not a response.

She sighed, turning towards the boy. “It doesn’t matter what reasons you have, does it? You’re injured, so we’ve decided to help you.” She bit the inside of her cheek. If Kieran noticed the hypocrisy, though, he didn’t bother pointing it out like he usually would.

“You’re nice,” the boy commented, then muttered, “and very lucky, apparently.”

_I’d hardly consider myself lucky,_ Lauren thought to herself, before realizing that Kieran used the words luck to describe their situation as well. _Money really does make all the difference, does it?_

Kieran finished up applying ointment on his injured leg, and after forever of not speaking he finally said: “Try not to strain your leg, let it heal for a few days. Same goes for your shoulder.”

“Thank you,” the boy said appreciatively, looking at him with respect. He turned to her and did the same. “I’ve got to go before they—I’ve got to go, but thank you for your help.”

Lauren gave him a polite smile in return. “Stay safe out there. It’s tough, but…”

“I’ll manage,” he said with a reserved smile of his own. He gave Kieran a final curt nod, before heading for the door.

“What’s your name?” Kieran asked, and Lauren took a double take, looking at him in surprise. Out of all the questions he could’ve asked the boy— out of all the things he could’ve _spoken_ in the last hour, he didn’t seem like he would be most curious about the boy’s _name_ , of all things.

The boy seemed to be just as dumbfounded. “Emrys,” he responded hesitantly. “Emrys Sylvester.”

Kieran nodded at him, before turning back to tidy up the first aid kit. The boy—Emrys—didn’t seem to be all too surprised that his name was asked, and simply nodded at her once more before leaving the apartment. The sound of the door closing was followed with a minute of silence, and Lauren only realized after that since Emrys left, Kieran hadn’t moved an inch, his hands stopping altogether, his gaze set in stone but his mind lost.

She stared entranced. He didn’t give her the explanation she wanted; instead, he shook his head, standing up to return the first aid kit. When he got out of the bathroom he said, “I shouldn’t have done that.”

Lauren furrowed her brows. “Why not?” she asked. “I thought you’d have a little bit more sympathy for him than I would.”

“And you should go home,” he pointed at her, ignoring her question. When he saw that she wouldn’t budge, he sighed and headed for the stool where Emrys had been seated, and Lauren seated herself on the chair across him. He sat facing the side, eyes zoning out as he fell back into his own reverie.

Lauren would prod, but he seemed so uniquely pensive that she felt it’d be too wrong to ruin the moment, so she kept her mouth shut.

“I was like him,” Kieran started. Lauren figured just as much, but she nodded anyway.

He continued, “I was one of the orphans, and they’d picked me up, trained me to be one of theirs. One of them. Their methods weren’t very… diplomatic, as you would assume of the Phantom Scythe. You’ve pretty terrible views of them, shouldn’t be too hard for you to imagine, I presume.”

She swallowed the lump in her throat, but didn’t bother responding to that.

“What happened to him was just one of the many forms of ‘training’ they did to us, to keep us ‘in shape’. But obviously, it wasn’t a training many of us liked. So some of us would try to escape. Myself included.”

_That sounds like Kieran indeed_ , Lauren thought. The Kieran she knew was stubbornly ambitious, not unlike herself, though she wouldn’t be too sure whether it fell under the positive category of traits or otherwise.

The latter seemed to be truer in his story: “And someone _did_ find us, all broken, battered and bruised. They took us in, nursed us back into a certain amount of health, because we were that broken—they stalled for time, tried to give us a chance to live. But no one makes it out of the PS alive. They found out eventually, and captured us once more. It was good while it lasted, I suppose.”

Lauren waited, an eyebrow raised.

“As punishment… as punishment they—they beat me up further, harsher, longer. To the point I barely had any muscles to spare, and I could feel the air through my ribs.” Lauren shuddered at the imagination, her face plastered with worry, even though that day might’ve been long gone in the past. “I didn’t mind. I rarely did. But they—they made me kill him, the man who rescued us, with my own hands.”

Lauren couldn’t hold back the gasp that escaped her lips, and all of a sudden she seemed to understand why he was so conflicted. “God, I’m so sorry,” she breathed in her shock, but Kieran seemed unfazed.

“So you see how it turned out the last time a man tried to help some of us out of our torture,” he simply concluded, chuckling humorlessly. “You see what _I’ve_ become.”

“Why did you—” Lauren contemplated briefly on refraining from asking him further, but she was too curious for her own good— “why did you kill the man? Did you have no choice?”

“You seem to still have the belief that I could be human in the least,” Kieran said mirthlessly, finally turning to look at her in the eye, and she was taken aback by the intensity in his cerulean orbs. “I _had_ a choice, Lauren. We always have a choice. If I hated killing that much I would’ve just allowed myself to die instead of falling puppet to their plans. I have a reason, so I chose the path that suit my plans. Anyone as ambitious would’ve done the same—so did the boy earlier. You would’ve realized, not many just decide to run away with that much injuries, to the point of crossing over the river. If he had that much will to survive, he’d have as much of a reason to turn into a monster, if it meant saving what he cherished.”

Lauren stared back at him, feeling an odd surge of… of calm in her as she did. She didn’t say it—but it gave her some assurance that—that there was someone quite driven like _she_ was, someone who’d take devastating risks for their own selfish reasons, that she wasn’t the only one who felt this way. But it also made her realize that maybe Kieran White wasn’t as much of a monster as she made him out to be, or that… or that _she_ was as much of a monster. After all, she teamed up with the assassin—little of the socially acceptable moral conduct would pardon such thing—solely for her personal revenge. She knew, if she were in his position, she would’ve done as much, if not worse.

But then— “So why did you?” She jutted her chin at the door. “Do that, I mean.”

He took his gaze off her, chuckling to himself. “We’ve got a whole list of enemies down to kill us, one more teenage boy wouldn’t hurt, would it? Might as well save a life while we can.” Lauren scoffed, but there was little humor. “But also…” he faltered.

He lifts his eyes back to hers and _looked_ at her so solemnly, and for once, she didn’t quite want to look away. He did have beautiful eyes.

“I don’t… I don’t know.”

Her heart broke upon hearing the truthfulness in his hesitation. Very rarely had Kieran White ever been so unsure of what he wanted and why he did things, but in this moment he seemed to be as young as that boy, lost, desperately looking around for some form of salvation.

“I…” he took a deep breath, releasing it just as slowly. “I know that what happened turned out for the worse, that the man ended up dying by my hands and that whatever little help he gave us became futile, but eventually, what he did… it saved me. I… he’s the reason I…”

Lauren wanted to tell him that he didn’t have to force himself, but her throat was quite clogged from seeing _him_ in such pain from simply saying words. She clenched her fists instead, staring at him with utmost worry.

Eventually he tore his gaze from her, and stood up abruptly. What he did next caught her by surprise: he went to unlock the door he always kept locked. He kept his hand on the door handle for a good while as he seemed to reconsider his decision, but in the end he pushed the door open, not looking behind to check if she was coming, before leaning against the door to reveal—

“ _Oh my god,_ ” Lauren gasped softly as she saw the amount of papers he had hung on the wall. She hadn’t seen them from close up yet she _knew_ , as she’d suspected, that they were of his drawings; she didn’t expect that he’d have whole boxes and walls of drawings, however. Her body shot out of the chair as she made her way inside the room, only to be faced with impossibly more and _more_ drawings, from really rough sketches of passing sceneries to detailed close-ups. Her jaw fell open in absolute astonishment.

“He told me… he told me to remember. To remember what it feels like to be human.” Kieran’s voice was more silent than ever, yet it was steady, like the still ocean under a yielding moon. “So I drew, and drew, and drew.”

“This—Kieran, this—” Lauren exhales, utterly at a loss for words. “This is _beautiful_.”

“Now don’t you go falling in love with me, I know I’m an amazing artist,” he commented under his breath, and she found herself an odd sense of pride in making him joke, even if only for a moment. But also:

“You really are an amazing artist,” she told him earnestly, utterly entranced by the sketches she saw before her. There was this… magic in them, she felt, even in its simplicity—even if it was composed only of simple lines and curves, even if it was completely two-toned—she felt like she could spend hours just gazing at each drawing, as each seemed to be telling an entire story, full of color, full of _life_. She had to blink several times to make sure she wasn’t seeing things, that it was indeed just a trick of the light, that he did indeed draw on the papers purely with graphite. Perhaps that was what happened when one poured out so much… so much _emotion_ into their craft, Lauren thought. She wouldn’t know; she spent her life wearing her heart on her sleeve, after all.

She let her eyes linger on the drawings on the wall before her eyes latched on to the big picture by his side. It was of him and a girl, seemingly about a few years younger than him, with a smile that rivalled Kym Ladell’s extravagant grin. She seemed to be mid-laughter while Kieran glared at her playfully, a hint of a smirk up the corner of his lips, but his expression was one she’d never seen before, an expression so terribly fond and genuinely proud.

He didn’t explain, and so she didn’t ask.

“I know that if we help him, there’s an ever so slight chance we’d be outed eventually,” Kieran admitted, “and we might be killed. I know it was risky, so I didn’t want to, but…”

Lauren stopped her scan of the room to look at him briefly, asserting all the kindness—wait, _kindness?_ —she could muster for him. “You don’t have to explain,” she told him. “It’s fine. I understand.”

When he looked at her, his eyes were filled with stars (or perhaps just another trickery from the vivid moonlight glittering through the window) and _so much tenderness_ , she could hardly believe that _she_ was the cause of the look. Two of the coarsest people in the universe together, and yet it felt like they were walking on clouds of cotton. Her heart nearly gave out from the genuineness of it all.

She cleared her throat, looking away before she could give away more of her flustered self. “You know, if we win this war against the PS, he—Emrys—might never have to turn out the way you did. What you fear wouldn’t have to happen.”

Kieran nodded. “Which is why we have to win it at all costs.”

Overwhelming positivity for they who haven’t found a lead in days, but Lauren nodded nonetheless. Then she seemed to spot a drawing at the corner of the room. “Is that—is that _me_?”

When she turned to Kieran, he was outright blushing. “I draw everybody,” he reasoned. “Don’t flatter yourself too much.”

Lauren smiled to herself at the adorable sight of a flushed Kieran, looking back at the drawing, before her eyes fell on a paper underneath that, lying on top of one of the boxes. It was of their first encounter, where he held her against his sword, but he’d written on the corner of the paper:

_Why did I freeze?_

She never expected for her to figure out anything before Kieran did, given his tactful self—but in that moment she herself finally understood why he hesitated that night they met.

They were one and the same, driven by revenge, by love (of whatever form), by sheer ambition and skill. That he wasn’t _alone_.

Much contrary to popular belief, Kieran White wasn’t some killing machine who murdered for fun, relentlessly, upon being given any order. He was just like any other desperate human, doing all they can do to fight the war they had to fight, even if that meant ruining themselves, and so much more, on the way.

He was trying, _trying_ to remain human in spite of everything, in spite of them programming him to be the monster he was known to be. He wasn’t trying to be good—but neither was she. He was just trying to live, to survive, the way she powered through as a detective to catch the Phantom Scythe criminals because it would ease her guilty heart.

They were one and the same, and pain recognized pain.

He was just as much of a broken soul as she was—he was terribly, _terribly_ , human.

* * *

** Appendix C: _Homo sapiens_ **

Reference material(s):

> _“You didn’t even tell him?”_
> 
> _Lauren shakes her head, chuckling a little. “Not even when we ended up making love. That—god, I can’t believe I’m talking to_ you _of all people about this—that was so messy, so unplanned. I’m not even sure how it happened. It’s really not the kind of romantic you might be expecting.”_
> 
> _“So I wasn’t supposed to be born?” Nova questions, but not with hostility._
> 
> _Lauren nods hesitantly. “Not that I don’t want you, mind you—but I definitely hadn’t seen you coming. Or that whole thing, for the matter. It just happened—we were both quite frustrated and desperate because_ nothing _seemed to be going right for us. And we were like, 90% sure we were going to die soon. And we only had each other.”_
> 
> [section 3.65–68]

—

“March knows,” he announced the second he stepped foot through the door, in a tone foreign to the man’s voice, not even waiting for the door to close.

Lauren, who had only been seated on the kitchen counter for ten minutes—because she also had just arrived—stood up abruptly upon the sound of the door opening. “Kieran, we’re in trouble—what did you just say?”

Kieran paused, mirroring her surprised expression. “Did you find something?”

“I— _fuck_ ,” she cursed under her breath, running a hand through her messy locks. “I messed up.”

“Don’t tell me you left the house.”

Lauren kept quiet, her eyes darting everywhere around the room other than his face.

“Lauren, for fuck’s sake,” Kieran groaned as he threw his head back in frustration. Lauren had been cooped up in his apartment for the past few days, after being caught as being the part of Lune from within the APD, due to a careless mistake she’d made and the lack of an alibi to prove her innocence. It wasn’t a wonder how frustrated he’d be at her at the moment, but they were pressed for time, and she was never the rational one of the two.

“Look, I’m sorry, but I can’t just do _nothing_ ,” Lauren argued. “But what did you mean by, ‘March knows’?”

“Lauren—” Kieran took a step closer to her, looking her straight in the eye. “In case it wasn’t glaringly clear to you, you’re stuck here, in the house of the assassin you fucking loathe, because you were, as you always were, careless in your tracks, recklessly doing what you want. I know you’re desperate, so am I, but at this rate they’ll kill us before we get to even do anything.” He then took a deep breath before continuing: “It’s enough that they caught you, but now _March_ suspects _me_ as well, and he’s leading the search for Lune.”

“Oh my god,” Lauren breathed out. “What—March? What did he say to you?”

Kieran shook his head, throwing the file he was holding on the table. “He didn’t _say_ he suspected me—but he dropped me a file before he left, telling me to review it,” he explained, unbuttoning the top button of his archivist uniform as he leaned against the head of the couch. “It was on the Snapdragon. The file we’ve been looking for, that was completely removed from the archives.”

Lauren’s eyes turned wide as saucers, looking back and forth between him and the file. “How—how does he even have that?”

“Our bigger concern is how he _knows_ we need that, to begin with. How he knows it’s me you’ve been working with, and that we need information regarding the Snapdragon, a group almost nobody knows about.” Lauren picked up the file as he spoke, briefly skimming through the file, and her jaw drops at the information contained in it. “And, yes, the Royals’ blatant influence on their eradication,” Kieran confirmed. “How would he get that information—I highly doubt he’s a regular detective, and as of now we have no idea what his intentions of helping us could be.”

March—Lauren had always respected him, not only because he was a law-abiding officer true to his morals at all times, but also because he was always cordial and caring in his work, even against the vilest of criminals. To think that he could be possibly hiding an interior motive… and all this time, she’d always looked up to him…

“You said you found something,” Kieran interrupted her momentary shock. “Where were you to begin with?”

Lauren flopped onto the stool, sighing in exasperation. “I went down to the docks, to figure where they might be storing the nitro. I saw that woman from the Carmine Camellia and followed her, but then I saw—oh god, that makes so much more sense now.”

“Lauren, what did you see?” Kieran’s voice was so stern and deep, it sent chills down her spine.

“Dakan. I saw Dakan Rhysmel,”

“Dakan Rhysmel, the King’s right hand man? _That_ Dakan Rhysmel?”

“Do you know any other Dakan Rhysmel, then?” Lauren retorted, scoffing. “I saw those glittering emerald eyes. I just _know_ it’s him. What I don’t know is whether he saw _me_ or not, and I pray to the heavenly stars he didn’t, but—but I _saw_ him, and I trusted him before, but now—now I don’t even know if I can trust anyone anymore. Dakan, a fucking member of the Royal Palace, and March, who was once my superior, someone I viewed like family. I—”

“As much as I want to empathize with these newfound betrayals in your life—” Lauren gave him a cold look for daring to lie to her face, but then again she supposed he wasn’t too surprised that people around her would betray her. In all fairness, neither should she, not when she’d been directly warned that someone around her would betray her, and Kieran himself had said that not everyone around her was working for the law. She just didn’t quite expect… “—the bigger issue here is that now both of our covers are blown, and possibly to both the Phantom Scythe and the APD,” Kieran summed up, and though he sounded much more composed than she was, she noticed his jaw was much more taut than usual, his fingers all too restless.

It was silent for a while, only the faint sound of the turbulent waters in the river outside.

“We’re probably going to die first, aren’t we?” Lauren muttered in hopelessness.

“Only a fool’s wish that there’s a possibility in which we _don’t_ die,” Kieran scoffed. “It’d be a miracle if one of us even makes it past the next month alive.”

The moisture in her tongue had evaporated, and her mouth tasted foul. She stared bitterly at the carpet ahead of her, nails digging into her skin in agitation as she tried to think, _think_ of _any_ possible solution—a way out—but his words, as she’d registered them, were—truth.

They were going to die. That was that.

She lifted her head briefly to see him already staring at her contemplatively, eyes darker under the lack of light in the room, the moonlight barely reflected through a sharp glint in them.

And somehow, even when they lunged for each other, they did that in synchrony, faces colliding like north and south attracted to each other.

In that moment, everything fell apart—all self-restraint was gone, replaced with an overwhelming need to inhale the other, feel the other down to each particle, passing through every cell of their bodies, their weakly human bodies, as they crave for more and _more_. Lauren, who had always been disgusted by the mere thought of even coming within a kilometer’s radius from him, tugged on his neatly tied hair as she lapped her tongue over his, tasting the walls of his mouth, of _him_ as she pushes herself against him, closer, closer than she’d ever dared come close to anyone, let alone an assassin. _An assassin you fucking loathe_.

_Primal instinct is all it is_ , she told herself as she began to push Kieran towards the back of the couch, their feet dancing in a drunken sequence. The innate drive to bond in physical nature, the most bottom line of human needs, without which one cannot live. Who was she to deny her own flesh, when the threat of death seemed more imminent than ever?

His ass hit the head of the couch, but she only pushed further, her hips flushed against his. He bit back a groan, one hand to his side to steady himself and the other pressing deeply with the thumb on her collarbone and the other fingers on her shoulder, a final attempt to hold himself back. He must’ve felt her tense under his touch, because he paused to open his eyes, looking at her solemnly.

She was scared. She _should_ be scared. 

But she didn’t care very much about it at the moment. She pulled his head back to her, angling her head to go in deeper, fingers digging in his body, anchoring herself to him like he was her survival, drinking, _drowning_ in him. 

His body had seemed to conquer all rationality by then, and his hands began to pull her closer to him as well, digging in her fiery copper hair and the soft flesh of her ass. She lifted a knee and pressed it against the couch and his hip, trapping him inside, and she revelled at his carnal reaction, the way he couldn’t resist just as she couldn’t, the way he gravitated to her like it was all preprogrammed in his every cell.

His mouth left hers to travel the edges of her face, dipping into the curve of her neck and the cap of shoulder, leaving trails of open-mouthed kisses. Her hand latched on to his hair, pulling the fringes out of what had previously been neatly pulled back in a braid. 

Then she felt his teeth digging into her skin, leaving more marks on her body—yet whatever fear, whatever pain arose from the feeling was easily submerged by want, need, and the greater fear of losing it all—the feeling of simply being alive and tangible. She held on even tighter, like she’d fall deep into the endless abyss if she didn’t.

Before she realized it, he had pulled her over to the front of the couch, him under her, and all was removed from her brain other than the shot of pleasure coursing underneath her skin and the thought that this was always how it was meant to be, that this just felt _right_.

Lauren traced her fingers over Kieran’s neckline down to his collarbones, before beginning to unbutton his shirt. He was breathing slowly, but his tightened grip on the exposed skin of her hips and the hardened length pressed against her stomach betrayed his impatience. She allowed herself to feel his animatic breathing, palm flat against his toned muscles lined with scars from an endless battle.

_Alive_. They were alive. 

Scarred, but alive, and she’d much rather keep it that way.

In one swift motion, he tugged on her wrist and she fell, his mouth brushing the lobe of her left ear. The mere exhale he let out sent shivers through her skin, but she stilled and willed herself not to crumble. His hands reached under his shirt which she was wearing, and he pried it off her in an instant.

Playing with fire had never felt so sweet. She took his lips, again and again, savoring the taste even if it burned her tongue. She watched as his eyes travelled with lack of his better judgment, lidded and obscured by his own imagination, and her own mind began to wonder how much more he could give.

Under Lauren Sinclair’s trademark boldness, she slowly rolled her hips, feeling his arousal against her, and her own in her bones. His grips turned to claws piercing her body—and she’d deem him her beast, but who was she to point fingers when she was taunting him with the devil’s horns? He didn’t bother hiding his pleasure, letting out a heavy sigh, but of course she still wanted _more_. Nothing would ever be enough for the determined—and anyone could tell that of them, Lauren and Kieran were the only two who could rival the others’.

Never would she have thought that they’d be satiating _each other’s_ needs, but now that they were here, she won’t be complaining—especially not when they weren’t even going to be alive to face the consequences.

Her movements increased in speed, and so did their breathing; she knew there was no point in holding back. There never was; the unraveling began the moment he stepped through the door that night, or even the moment she took his hand in hers. She pulled away from his face briefly, yet despite the silence he knew what she meant by the gaze. He always seemed to do.

“You sure?” She felt the vibrations of his deep voice resonate through the skin contact, travelling all the way up her back, and it only strengthened her resolve. 

“Unless you’re too much of a coward to take me on.”

“You say that now,” he threw a lazy smirk, and it made her blood boil, so she kissed it away. His light-hearted mood died as soon as it appeared, his eyebrows knitted as he poured his desperation in their kiss. Their hands moved frantically to remove the rest of their clothes, leaving skin seared against skin, scorching both sides, and she wondered whether the Phlegethon river flowed from paradise instead.

Perhaps on any other day she’d hold back, but the root of their problems was exactly that: that they _didn’t_ have time to take it slow.

She didn’t bother teasing him further, and nor did he with his snarky comments. She aligned herself against him, and before she could think twice—not like Lauren Sinclair ever did—she pushed her hips against his, forcing him inside her. 

She felt her whole body tremble ever so slightly under the friction, but she pushed him deeper, directing the urge to release all tension to her clenched fists.

“Fuck,” Kieran cursed quietly under his breath, gripping her thighs firmly as she continued to roll her hips against his, powerful but languidly like angry sea waves. “ _Fuck_.”

Lauren was panting, clawing on him to restrain herself from giving out then and there. But he brought his hands up her thighs and his thumbs were pressing against her and she just felt so, so aware of him and her ravenous desire to let go, to give her all, to succumb into the high.

“ _Lauren_ ,” he begged at last, and maybe she would’ve enjoyed the sound of her name in his mouth a little more if she wasn’t so desperate herself, a dam just waiting to be utterly shattered. Eventually, she let herself yield—and so did he, both broken absolutely loose. Magma dripped down her legs, but she’d never been so pleased to be charred, while he continuously fuelled the fire straight into the erupting volcano. But more than anything—it was pulsing, the rapid beating synchronized with their hearts, the vivacity of it all that she held on to, that she absorbed in their intercourse.

In their high, no words were voiced spare for the moans and whimpers of pain and pleasure, and when they came down from it all that was left was heavy breathing, filling the quiet air of the night.

When Lauren finally regained a fraction of clear vision, she looked down to see remnants of what could only be defined as an utter disaster. Kieran’s jet black locks were strewn everywhere, damp with sweat, framing his flushed face and hazy sapphire eyes. Lips parted, wisps of breath came in and out of his mouth, exhausted by the rapid vigorous exchange—or perhaps, like herself, still quite in shock over what they’d just done. Surely neither of them would’ve seen _this_ coming, of all things—but in retrospect it was only predictable, with the way they were enclosed in the same magnetic field, unable to be free from the other.

She didn’t bother looking south; she could still feel the wetness of everything. “Sorry,” she breathed out, prying herself off him at last. She steadied herself by placing a hand on the desk across the couch, her legs two seconds from giving away.

“It’s…” Kieran sighed, bringing a hand to his forehead. Now that there was some distance between her, Lauren had a better view of his full body, and took her time to appreciate just how… gorgeously defined he was. She looked away to stop her mind from running even wilder than it already was, bending to pick up the clothes she’d been wearing, before heading for the bathroom.

She locked the door and leaned against the wall, staring straight into the eyes of her reflection in the mirror. Naked, vulnerable, stripped of every brick and barrier she had built, built against him.

How—how did things come to _this_?

How did she let herself be so weak, so desperate, latching on to him like he was the last of humanity in the apocalypse—when _she_ should know so, so much better?

Such a beastly behavior, to submit into the fucking flesh, reduced to being stimulated by mere chemicals—and yet this time she couldn’t blame _him_ and him alone.

Maybe she was wrong. They were one and the same—but maybe it wasn’t him who was like her. Maybe it was her who’s been the monster all along, the monster under the disguise of an ordinary human’s life, who’d been given the privilege of a peaceful living.

She promptly cleaned herself and put on her clothes, before heading out of the bathroom. Kieran was already out of the couch, dressed in a plain t-shirt and trousers, standing by the kitchen counter. He took one glance at her, noted her somber look, and gulped.

“Go to sleep,” he simply said, voice still raspy.

“And you?”

“I’ll take the couch.”

She gave him an unamused look, but he clearly wasn’t in the mood to reason himself. Eventually, she concluded that they’d broken enough boundaries for one night, and dropped the argument, heading into his bedroom to do as he told her.

Suffice to say, that night, she didn’t get the dreamless sleep she’d always wished for.

* * *

** Appendix D: Death takes and takes **

Reference material(s):

> _“And this…” Her steps slow down to a halt near the rail of the bridge._
> 
> _“This is where he left for the last time.”_
> 
> _Nova stares at her with beaded eyes, not quite understanding. “B–but— but why did he leave?”_
> 
> _Lauren let out a small scoff. “I don’t know,” she says humorlessly, “he never told me what happened. We were fugitives, yet I was so—_ mad _, I started screaming at him in the quiet night without minding who could hear us, telling him to stay. I_ begged _him to stay, not to leave me alone. But in the end, I had to let go.”_
> 
> [section 4.8–11]
> 
> _“Not that I hate it. But life—well, ours, at least—isn’t that much of a fairytale. An assassin doesn’t just fall in love with a cop and repent and everything gets solved. As I’ve said, there’s a reason your father isn’t here with us right now.”_
> 
> [section 5.10]

—

_Kieran_. She needed to find Kieran White, _now_.

Lauren was, to a small extent, lucky—in that Greychapel was always submerged in darkness, so that it made it harder for them to find her as she ran by the walls of the abandoned buildings, and that she’d been there enough times to make her way out of the precinct in the shortest time possible. The flip side to that was that the Phantom Scythe assassins on her tail would be just as acquainted with the area as she was, if not more, so she had to depend on them not knowing she’d disappeared from underground for as much as possible, hoping she’d make it anywhere outside of the 6th precinct and in safety before they start looking for her.

The last thing she was expecting, when she finally reached the riverside and was running towards the bridge, was to see Kieran already there. It would’ve been fine, _great_ , even, if not for the fact that he was on the ground, leaning against the railing of the bridge, unmoving. 

Lauren did not waste time in running to him, and soon noticed he was clutching his abdomen, and that it was… bleeding. _Shit_. “What on earth happened?” she asked frantically, falling on her knees to match his eye level, and he lifted his head with strenuous effort to face her.

His eyes—when she saw them it settled in her gut like a heavy weight that something was really, _really_ wrong, and not just the fact that he was injured. She’d seen Kieran White in many forms—livid, unhinged, delirious—but _broken_ was never one of them.

But his eyes—

When nothing came out of his mouth after a while, Lauren sighed exasperatedly. She briefly checked back at the direction of Greychapel, before looking back at him resolute. “Come on, let’s go, you can explain on the way,” she urged, no matter how much it stung to see him in pain. She moved to stand up, but he didn’t budge, seemingly still very out of it.

“Kieran, we’ve _got to go_ ,” she gritted through clenched teeth.

“I—they killed her.”

Lauren blinked. _Wh—_ she was about to ask, but it dawned on her as quick as it came who he meant when she saw the aghast look on his face. Someone he cherished, the reason he’d been doing this all. The girl in the large picture frame, on the walls of the room where he kept his humanity confined. And they...

“They killed her,” he repeated, his voice quivering, his lips trembling so heavily it was hard to believe the man before her was Kieran White, the same man she’d been working with the past few months. “They killed her, and I—I went berserk and I—I killed _so many people_.”

He lifted his hands, covered in blood, in front of his face. Lauren wasn’t sure whether it was his or the blood of those he killed—but when she saw that his wound was exposed, she hurried to cover it up with her hand, looking at him frantically. As surprised as she was by his statement, he was bleeding out so much, and she needed to patch him up as quickly as possible, but…

“Lauren, I—” he choked up a sob, and she couldn’t help the sharp inhale through her teeth. “I killed them. I killed them all, all those people, dead, because of me.”

_God_. She knew what he meant—he’d told her, he didn’t kill unless it was an order, or it was the only way. She wanted to reassure him—tell him that it was fine? That it was rational? That it was the only way for him? But even without her ability he’d know—he _always_ did, that bastard—he’d know she would be lying. _Nothing_ about it was okay. And yet, for some reason, she couldn’t help but feel _bad_ for him instead, especially when she was seeing up close how much the mere thought of it tormented him.

“You have to go,” Kieran said while she contemplated on what to respond to him. She lifted her eyes in surprise to see a total shift in his demeanor; still pained, but more determined, or perhaps desperate. “Lauren, you have to go, they’ll come for you soon.”

Still lost, she croaked out, “What the—what the fuck is going on, Kieran?”

“The leader isn’t here,” he rambled. “Of course he isn’t. Probably just sees us as some nuisance—he’s got to be hiding in the walls of the castle, safe and sound—”

“No wait—” Lauren shook her head frantically. “Who stabbed you, and why are you—”

“Lauren, _listen_ ,” Kieran stopped her, and the tone of finality in his voice froze her to the core. “Go. Go home; you can trust Tristan, so go _home_ , run as fast as possible—”

“I can’t just leave you—” she argued—because it would only be stupid for him to think she would stop arguing against him.

“Let me go, Lauren.”

She paused.

“Let me go,” he whispered.

They stared at each other for a few seconds, not daring to say anything—

and then she felt her blood rise, the tension flowing to the back of her head. “You can’t just—you can’t just leave me alone—leave me alone to deal with everything by _myself_!” She shrieked, but his face remained unperturbed. She wasn’t even sure why she was screaming recklessly (or maybe she’d always known that she just didn’t want to hear her heart break, break upon hearing the weakness in his voice, didn’t want to accept the truth). “Oi, you _have_ to stay alive. Come on, let’s get you to the hospital—”

“I can’t do that,” Kieran gritted out. “If I go to the hospital, they’d lock us up, and everything we’d been doing will be for naught.”

“Then at least we can go to your apartment—” Lauren groaned frustratedly. “Just shut up, and _let’s just fucking go already_.”

Lauren shoved an arm under his and wrapped it around his back, before slowly lifting herself. Kieran tried to stand with her as his support, but in an instant he dropped back onto the ground, and so did her heart.

She watched him breathe in and out heavily, unable to say a thing, and didn’t realize she was doing the same but in twice the speed, beginning to hyperventilate. “No, no, Kieran, no,” the words rushed out of her mouth in one desperate breath. She placed both hands on his cheeks, forcing him to face her, but his eyes were unfocused. “Hey. _Hey_. You gotta stay. Hey, _look at me_. You have to survive with me, okay?” She slapped his cheeks with as little force as she could, trying to get him to snap back to reality. “Kieran, _fuck_ , you can’t leave me. Don’t leave me, you idiot, come on, let’s go—”

“Lauren—” he finally shifted his eyes to hers—and Lauren regretted wishing he’d look into her eyes, because it felt like gazing into the deep, deep sea, an entity she’d never understand, not even if she spent her whole life swimming in it, not without drowning herself entirely, not without having the water flow through her bloodstream, filling up her heart, consuming her from within. And that was what it felt like to see his eyes at that moment, so much filled with raw emotion she’d never seen in him, and for once she didn’t want to look—because she knew—she knew that it would be the last.

Kieran coughed out in broken spurts, “Lauren… I’m… tired.”

She felt her heart torn in pieces like each of those words, and she wished she’d never had a heart to _feel_ to begin with.

But she had to be strong when he couldn’t be, just like he did that for her, time and time again. “No,” she said with all the world’s defiance. “You’ve come this far, Kieran, you have to watch it end. You can’t—you started this, you have to be there with me when it ends. Don’t you even _dare_ think of leaving me alone. Don’t you _fucking dare_.”

Even in these final moments, Kieran White did not cry out tears—but his eyes glossed brighter than ever, and she saw through them the reflection of the last quarter towering brightly over them. 

His head then fell, and he stared intently at her hand over his wound, bleeding out at a rate none the slower. He laid his hand over hers softly, shaking his head. “I’ve done… my best,” he tried to speak as calmly as possible, taking deep breaths between every phrase, every word requiring more effort than the last. “I’ve done… all I can… haven’t I—haven’t I done… enough?”

Lauren wanted to scream that no, indeed, he hadn’t—he’d lived his life reaping and reaping, but not once had he sown himself; she wanted to yell it straight into his head that he had to live and pay for his crimes, instead of leaving like this—but the weary expression on his face, sans the energy it usually carried, the lack of blood coloring his skin, it clogged her throat, and she was unable to say a word.

“Please… please… let me rest.” His voice was barely a whisper by the end, and at that very moment a tear dropped from the corner of her eye, and then another, and then she was crying silent streams of tears down her cheeks.

“NOO!” she screeched, still as obstinate. Sniffling, she begged, “Please, please, _please_ stay, Kieran please don’t go— please you can’t do this to me— please, please, Kieran _please_ —”

He used up the rest of his energy to _smile_ at her, and she would’ve glared and cursed at him for the sheer audacity he had to even smile at such a dire moment, if not for the fact that he was going to die. But if only she knew what he was going to say next, she would have picked the cursed smile over that over and over again, would rather stare at it for an eternity even if it broke her heart to see it, over having to hear his next words:

“I… I hesitated… because… I made the deal… with you… because… because you’re… beautiful… beautifully… human. Lauren—I…” 

Kieran’s eyes fluttered close, and his lips parted into the softest, weakest grin he’d ever given, and he said— 

He said—

“I love you… truly.”

And Lauren could no longer restrain her sobs, howling in the middle of the dead quiet night, not minding that she was being chased, not caring if anyone was listening, just crying over him with her lungs burning and her heart barely able to beat, because it felt like she was the one being stabbed, stabbed over and over and over again.

She hated Kieran White so, so, _so_ much.

“ _Go_ ,” he whispered for a final time.

His hand dropped from hers limply, and she watched as the light slowly faded out from his eyes as they lost their focus, and she couldn’t take it anymore. She turned around, lifted herself off the ground, and took a few shaky steps away from him—

Maybe then, maybe then she could pretend like she was the one who left him, like she didn’t know, or didn’t care, if he was dead or alive, like she was the one who ran to save herself. Maybe then she could say that she didn’t know whether he’d died or not; maybe then she wouldn’t have to spend her life knowing, blaming anyone—him or her—for his death, because she never knew. She never knew.

She’d spent the past decade looking for a _fact_ , a confirmation that her childhood friend was really dead, because she never found his body. And yet—and yet, now that she was offered the chance to witness a fact unfold before her very eyes, she realized—the truth was always worse than oblivion.

And she ran. She ran, faster, further and further away from him. The buildings of the 11th precinct blurred in her vision; she ran and ran without sight, going wherever her feet took her, away from the grim reality over by the bridge, as if it would be different in the confines of her mansion’s walls where everything seemed immaculate and bright, a world untainted, picture perfect, as if she never knew him.

She wished she never knew him.

Throughout the night, she wailed in endless grief, and it was considerably a miracle that she didn’t end up getting murdered herself by the Phantom Scythe assassins who had captured her earlier. That, or maybe even the stars above took pity on her, deciding to take watch on her for the rest of her tragic night.

(But maybe that was why she cried out in the first place—so she could be heard.)

_Over the bridge, Kieran White’s blurry gaze flitted to the sky, his eyelids fluttering._ _Hazy stars appeared in his vision, and though he wasn’t sure whether he was seeing real stars or mere trickeries of the street lamps, he kept his eyes open to linger on the view a little longer._

_“I’m sorry,” he breathed out, long after the woman was gone._

_It was ironic—that his final regret would be over his own death, instead of another life he’d taken—but Lauren Sinclair had always been different from the start, to the world as much as to himself. She didn’t deserve this—she didn’t deserve all the heartbreak and pain brought from knowing him—and he wanted to apologize to her for everything… but his apologies seem to be belated, as always; a secret he told only to the hyacinths he left. (Perhaps that was why no one could see him as anything other than a monstrous villain. No one was there to see his remorse, even until the very end.)_

_A stray tear escaped his eye, and he let out a final shaky breath._

_“Please let her have her peace,” he wished upon the stars he saw, before succumbing into eternal slumber._

_And so there went the Purple Hyacinth, dead under the blade of his very own origin. Those who hear his tale would have different opinions on him: some may say he was a villain for bringing so much horror to Ardhalis in the past decade, while those who know better may say he redeemed himself in the end by helping in the eradication of the Phantom Scythe. Regardless, his name would surely be immortalized in the tales to be passed down the families of Ardhalis, as someone who had contributed to the war between crime and justice._

_That was who the Purple Hyacinth was to people, anyway._

_In respect to Kieran White, though—the Purple Hyacinth was what eventually killed Kieran White—though it was something he’d have seen coming from the beginning; from the moment the assassin was born, he’d known that the two entities were intertwined—that he’d never be able to live like everybody else, live like a human, not even when the Phantom Scythe was gone and when they eventually decide to lock him up in prison for a lifetime. So did Kieran White kill the Purple Hyacinth: it was because of his conscience as human, his ability to_ feel _, that he ended up dying to save those he did cherish._

_In the end, Kieran White was the Purple Hyacinth, and the Purple Hyacinth was Kieran White, and he died just as any other man—painfully, tragically, into nothingness._

* * *

** Appendix E: A life for a life **

Reference material(s):

> _“You could’ve abandoned me,” she whispers, and the words pierce Lauren’s heart like invisible swords, front and back. “You could’ve let someone else take care of me. Why didn’t you?”_
> 
> _“Why—” Lauren finds her throat clogged, and she chokes on the words. “Why do you think I would ever abandon you?”_
> 
> [section 3.71–72]
> 
> _“Would he—would he have wanted to meet me?”_
> 
> _And this she says with certainty: “Of course. Of course he would have. Kieran White would’ve loved you, so, so much more than I could ever love you.”_
> 
> [section 4.28–29]
> 
> _“You still love him, don’t you?”_
> 
> _Lauren turns around to face her daughter. She stares into the sky, absorbing in the immeasurable amount of stars scattered throughout the obsidian night. With the corners of her mouth quivering slightly, she breathes out, “Unfortunately so.”_
> 
> [section x.2–3]

—

Plenty of the things that happened to Lauren Sinclair could only be defined as _severely unhealthy_ , but even _she_ hadn’t been expecting to be retching into the toilet bowl in the middle of the night.

She hadn’t been in the most pristine condition, not bothering to shower or even so much as look in the mirror as of late. She’d been strictly forbidden from leaving the mansion by her uncle, after the events that spanned the last five weeks, with the intention of letting her rest. Sure, she’d been catching up on sleep, at least—that was, if you consider five hours of sleep being torn apart by nightmares, sleep. She hadn’t done much else, keeping herself cooped up in her room for days unless she really needed to get out—which wasn’t much, because Tristan Sinclair, worried as he was, tried to empathize with her given situation.

The only thing he was extremely concerned about was that she hadn’t been eating at all. She could go days without eating, and he’d try to get her to eat at least some sugar—just to make sure she was still alive—but to Lauren, everything against her tongue felt like corrosive poison, even the taste of the roof of her own mouth. The mere thought of food sent her head reeling, so she never even dared to eat. Some days, she barely _drank_ ; the way the water mixed with her stomach acids intensely unbearable.

So it came off as a surprise to herself that she even had anything in her to throw up, spare those nasty stomach acids. (Of course, when she threw up it was largely made of water—she was still surprised from how she had the energy to project it out of the system with such force.) Maybe the acid had been too unbearable, eating at the walls of the stomach, that it compelled her to throw it out somewhere.

She dragged her feet out of the bathroom with tremendous effort, feeling her skin burn up over her fatigued muscles. The trip to her bed seemed longer than ever, and all she wanted to do was pass out—

but the taste of vomit was back on the base of her throat, threatening to spill out that very second. She whirled around in in instant, and the whole room began to spin in her head. It took her a while to regain her balance and get back on her feet, and when she walked she bent with a hand clutching her chest, her steps irregular like someone was abusing the brakes in her head, and she fell into the bathroom head first. She then picked herself up, situating herself over the bowl again (and she didn’t quite bother tying her hair back anymore—she knew at this point that she was an utter wreck and all too irredeemable in decency), before hurling it—whatever was left inside of her—out.

Again, after she finished she stood up, and walked her way like the living dead back inside her bedroom, wishing for _one_ peaceful night.

She was close to blacking out completely (and for a moment she really did think it was the end for her), fainting on her bedroom floor with a mouthful of vomit. She could barely breathe, let alone _think_.

And yet, if it weren’t for the last thought going through her head as she tangoed between consciousness and lack thereof, she would’ve been gone just like that. The thought made completely no sense—and she wouldn’t have ever thought such a thing while she was in a good condition (or at least, she would with precaution)—but it set all her nerves in striking alarm, settling dread deep in her guts and throughout her veins.

Her hand hovered over her stomach, fingers grazing the fabric of her nightgown.

She hadn’t gotten her period in a while now.

While she knew that it could’ve been just an irregularity due to the stress built up from recent events and the way she was handling it in terms of her health and lifestyle, she couldn’t help the growing fear that settled into her bones, that maybe, _just_ maybe…

If she was rational enough, maybe she would’ve calmed down, maybe she would’ve thought it through and get it checked out before jumping into conclusions. But yet—and perhaps wise men would say she’d only thought this because she was in her mood swings, she was in a terrible mental state or whatsoever, and yet—she knew, she _knew_ the consequence of her carelessness and desperation will come biting back at her, she knew the world still had its curses for her, she knew the skies wouldn’t let her _win_ just this easily, even though she’d been feeling like she _lost everything_.

Or maybe it was that—that she’d lost a life, and in return, in their mockery, they decided to grant her a life.

She felt like throwing up again. This time, though, it wasn’t because of the physiological nausea from inside her belly. The silence in the room was too loud, it sent her head reeling. Her limp body swayed, a ragged doll flung so carelessly around the room, as she stumbled her way back towards the bathroom.

She never made it there. Maybe she’d been walking in circles—she couldn’t tell her bearing. The tension on her knees gave way and she buckled, crashing straight toward the wooden floor.

_Leave me alone_ , she pleaded desperately, a prayer falling on deaf ears. _Please, please, leave me alone._

And if Kieran White were here—

He was here, in all his different forms. Leaning against her door was the assassin, the Purple Hyacinth, blood smeared over his gloves as he holds a steady grip on his sword, eyes blackened in heartlessness. By her board stood her partner in crime, a lopsided smirk sprawled across his cheeky face and crinkles on the corners of his bright blue eyes. A murderous monster sat on her desk dripping a toxic grin, crooked in ways that unsettled her guts. His human counterpart rested pensively by the window, face aged with worry and a care too awfully tender. Perched atop her own bed was the very father of the child within her, eyes lidded with a carnal desire too heavy to be held back.

In front of her, on the wooden floor and against the door to the bathroom, Kieran White sat, staring at her with glossy eyes, clad in bloodied clothing, a hand over his stab wound. His hand shot towards her, but she was too far from him. He rotated his hand anyway, palm croaking inward as steadily as clockwork, cradling the air as if he had her cheek against his palm.

And when he spoke, the voices of a thousand Kierans spoke in unison: _“You told me not to leave you.”_

She heard it in all his different tones, and she wasn’t sure which one of them hurt more:

Was it the man she first met, who looked down on her for her shallowness as an officer of the law?

Was it her subordinate, who teased her given every single opening he could?

Was it the one who called her out on her hypocritical bullshit with no remorse, or was it the one who, in all affection, nagged her for not thinking before she acted?

Was it the man who she found herself sleeping with, his touch on her bare body scorching her with the heat of a thousand suns, the one who filled her up as much as he dragged her down?

Or was it the man she held in her arms as she shook violently, speaking in wisps of smoke containing the final traces of life as a stray tear joined the blood smeared all over him, as he coalesced with his—his _predetermined_ fate at last?

She saw him ahead of her, forcing a smile on his face even in the seconds before death. Her surroundings melt to that of the bridge under twilight.

She suddenly found it _so much easier_ to yell at him—

“SHUT UP! Shut up, and _leave me ALONE_!”

Kieran White, injured, croaked his jaw open with visible anguish, frantically searching for the right words in his semi-conscious state.

Lauren never did allow him the luxury of speaking, so she went on like a train derailed off a mountain. “Don’t you dare twist my words. Don’t you _fucking_ dare make it sound like _this_ is what I deserved. Like this is what I _wanted_.”

“Wh–what did you want?” He asked weakly, and her blood only boils further underneath her flesh, charring her skin from within.

“Don’t you even _dare_ play dumb with me,” she seethes, steam seeping out of the cracks of her body and anger. “You’ve always been _so much smarter_ than I ever was, right? Why don’t you use that fucking head of yours and _figure_ for the life of you what–what I want?”

He didn’t reply.

He didn’t have to. Lauren knew he knew already— and she knew why he threw the question anyway.

“Is it funny? Is it that funny to watch me—” she coughed violently, only then noticing how hoarse her voice had been. “You—”

“You’re assuming again,” Kieran said in seldom softness, yet ironically it was his voice that cut through the rigidity of her heart. “You jumped to conclusions. I asked because I didn’t want to assume. What did you want, Lauren?”

“I want _YOU_ , Kieran!” She bellowed, her voice cracking.

The echoes that surrounded her ears died, and white noise strung through the loops in her head. She could barely hear herself when she yelled, “I want _you_ , you alive, you _with me_ , okay? I wanted to—” the breath she took dragged against her voice box and she grasped her throat, the pain of his hands on it nothing compared to _this_. “I wanted to watch the world as a new dawn began, the day the Phantom Scythe was declared gone. I wanted to congratulate you—I wanted to see you _smile_ over what we’d achieved, I wanted to see you in relief over knowing that they were no longer around to torment your life.

“And then I wanted to live—for once, I wanted to live like any other person, and I wanted to live that life with _you_. Don’t you get it? You’re the only one who understands what we’ve gone through, because we went through it all together. But—but you _left_. You _LEFT_ , you bastard.”

Kieran shook his head slowly, his bones cracking in broken waves as he heaved a heavy breath in.

“We’re not the same, Lauren.”

It wasn’t the dying man ahead of her who spoke. She whipped her head around, and the scenery whirls into that of the dead end where they first met. The assassin towered over her, holding his signature purple hyacinth in front of his pensive face.

“I took the lives of more people than the number of years you could ever live with the Phantom Scythe gone. What you consider relief, I consider an eternal hell loop.”

Tears pricked at her eyes, she could barely make him out. He was right—he always was.

(After all, if she didn’t already know this deep down, she wouldn’t have heard him say it to begin with. She condemned Kieran White for manifesting the truth even through his ghouls.)

“And so you left? Because it hurt? Because you wanted an easy way out?” Lauren spat, out with the bitter taste of vomit on her tongue. “You didn’t have the right to play judge and jury over others lives to begin with, let alone _your own_. What makes you think you deserved to die? No, you deserved to live, to suffer, to repent upon your own crimes. You shouldn’t have died until you bore the weight of every life you took, every stalk of hyacinth soaked in _blood_. You should’ve lived until then.”

It didn’t matter the amount of venom in her voice. She was sobbing too terribly to even be coherent.

As though he shared her pain— _like the monster could ever empathize_ —his voice fell silent, his look hesitant. He dropped to the ground, and back was the man being pulled by death over the bridge crossing to the slums.

He said, “Is that not why you let me go, in the end?”

Everything seemed to stop. Time, space, and for a while, her beating heart.

Everything imploded shooting straight for the heart, and in the whirlwind she was knocked backward. Her hand reached out to hold on to anything, _anything_ —

But when the fog cleared and she saw her room once more, her visions had begun to fade, appearing translucent before her very eyes. A surge of energy charged from within her, and she crawled desperately, clawed violently, holding on to Kieran White’s final appearance in her life—no matter how incorporeal.

“DON’T GO!” she shrieked, her screams morphing into sobs, then into silent shakes of her limp limbs. “Don’t— Kieran—”

Her body fell sideways, and she stayed, stayed still until the tears stopped streaming, until she was left with nothing but her own body and the barren room.

“I hate you.” Her mouth moved, but no voice could be heard. She might as well have been trying to speak underwater. She felt like drowning, anyway.

“I hate you,” she finally uttered after a while. And when she heard it, so _proud_ of the fact that she couldn’t detect a lie by her own ears, so _gratified_ that she got to proclaim what she’d always wanted to scream, she belted with increasing volume, “I hate you _so much_. I hate you. I fucking _hate_ you, you selfish piece of shit. I fucki— if you were _alive_ , I’d have killed you, and then I’d revive you just so I could _kill_ you, over and over again.

“That’s how much I hate you.”

She’d never know if the moon was listening; it had turned its back to her that cloudless night. No response came, reminding her again: Kieran White had left her. She was alone.

Something inside her churned. Lauren wasn’t sure whether it was acid biting the walls of her stomach, her ribcage compressed against her lungs, or her blood vessels constricting—even maybe her heart in its most physical sense. She brought up her hand to her chest reflexively, as though the act would ease the pain—

Her hand dropped, in jagged spurts, to her stomach, right below.

She wasn’t alone.

And they could repeat the cycle—she could start screaming at him again, fight against each mirage she saw of him, cry at him for—for leaving her with a memoriam so cursed, one she _couldn’t_ keep. She’d rather be utterly, terribly, alone, than be left with… with _this_. Yet, she’d curse him for leaving her alone, only to realize again that he never left her alone. She could repeat the cycle and make it _her_ personal _hell loop_ —

She despised him so, _so_ much, and all over again, for setting what was supposed to be _his_ curse over to _her_.

_If you really loved me, why did you trap me in this endless grief?_

When she cried again, her sobs weren’t as excruciatingly loud in hatred, or silent in pain. When she cried, there was an odd sense of rhythm in her dispersed breaths, her tears flowing down in ordered streaks. For once, she didn’t force it out of her system, nor was she repressing it.

She let the wails flow from her lips, and to those who belonged to the moon like she, the howls would sound like a melody just the right melancholy. She swam with the night and let herself _feel_ , until she remembered to breathe again.

A soft gasp escaped her lips, oxygen branching to the ends of her skin in slow motion.

She realized before she understood, that she didn’t want to let go of the child growing inside of her, not ever. Not even when she cursed him to the moon and back for it. Not even when it was to cause her physical pain for months, and then for the rest, too much emotional agony. And she thought it was bizarre, how she could already have such a strong emotional attachment to the unborn baby, when she hadn’t even so much as _felt_ the growing presence.

It wasn’t the baby.

It had always been him.

She didn’t have to scream it, she didn’t have to say it. She didn’t even have to so much think about it, the truth lodging itself between her heart chambers like a sharpened dagger.

She could roar, over and over again, of how much she loathed Kieran White for everything he’d done to her, and perhaps it would be a truth unchanging, rare as it were. All she had to do was rely solely on her lie distinction ability like the fool she’d always been, and she could believe wholeheartedly that it was the only truth that applied to his feelings for him.

Nothing would override the deafening sound of the unsaid truth.

Her lips parted, and the declaration was on the back of her throat—but she wondered if the posthumous confession would be unfair and entirely too cruel to him. She’d gone this far without saying it, anyway. _What good would yelling it do now?_

Did she even have to say it? She suspected he’d known anyway. The term wasn’t called _making love_ for naught. It was in love where they gave rise to their daughter, even if they never said it, even if it didn’t feel like the sparks and butterflies they sing of in their bliss, and more like the explosion and shattered fragments they dreaded from the Phantom Scythe.

And somehow… somehow, even if the child wasn’t _there_ to love yet, somehow she believed that in the child, in the child would be a side of Kieran White—if not _the_ one true side of him, before the Phantom Scythe came along and stripped it all off him—that she never got a chance to love wholeheartedly.

When she looked down to her hand resting over her womb, she knew, she _knew_ she’d never abandon the little child. She _shouldn’t_.

Because maybe Kieran White did leave her, with the final memoir in living form of a human so close yet so terribly different from himself. But maybe he’d have gifted her the child as a second chance for her to show him how she felt for him, so as to not live the rest of her life with regret.

(Of course Kieran would do such a thing, being so acquainted with the emotion itself.)

And maybe that too, in turn, was his final punishment for casting a lifelong curse on her—that he would never get to see his child grow in a world free of the pain that affected him, a pain _he_ helped eradicated from the city. She recalled the way excruciating sympathy glazed his eyes whenever they pass by the streets of Greychapel, a place once his home, and home to so much more children who lacked a chance to live. She remembered the time they helped that boy— _Emrys_ —against their better judgment, because it shouldn’t be about judgment when it came to a living human, no, no it shouldn’t, because he had a heart for the poor and needy, for those who knew pain. She saw before her the vivid images of him tending to the boy’s wounds with so much gentleness and care for a kid he’d never met before, like he was his own.

It took her everything not to scream her lungs out once again.

If Kieran White were alive, he wouldn’t have ever abandoned their child when they had a perfectly fine environment to thrive in. She knew he would’ve fought the world again for the unborn darling. He would’ve nurtured them well and watch them grow with pride much more than that which Lauren Sinclair held for herself. He would’ve loved the child so dearly, so much better than he could love anyone, more than _anyone_ could love anyone.

The child would’ve grown to be the most human of humans, and Kieran White would’ve died with some form of _peace_ upon knowing he’d retained—or at the very least, regained—the humanity until the very end.

A life for a life, a curse for a blessing. Life did not play favorites, but cruelty was the groundwork of justice—she, an officer of the law, knew just as much.

_You should’ve at least lived for me_ , she wanted to curse him still. _If not for all the crimes you’ve done, you should’ve at least lived for me, if you loved me. You could’ve loved me, before you loved our child. You_ would’ve _loved our child no matter the pain._

It was selfish, and she knew it.

She didn’t think she could ever understand how Kieran lived the way he did, but if—if he’d had begged his dying wish for her to let him go, to let him rest, then she knew he must’ve suffered tremendously, so much more than she could imagine.

And eventually, before she loved her child, she had loved Kieran White. She had felt the anguish of watching him live his cruel life. Above all, he’d done so much for her; setting him free was the _least_ she could do to repay the favor.

And the most—was to bear his curse as her own. That, too, she accepted in the end, because she loved him.

It wasn’t a sense of responsibility or righteousness that led her to the life-changing decision.

It was simply due to the fact that she couldn’t ignore:

In the end, she loved him anyway.

* * *

** Appendix F: Nova Sinclair-White **

Reference material(s):

> _“Well, I’m glad that it isn’t fiction,” Lauren tells her otherwise._
> 
> _“Huh?”_
> 
> _“All the pain has brought me you.” The words come out barely a breath, her having lost the ability to vocalize them. “Your existence, Nova, is worth all the pain in the world, and more.”_
> 
> [section 5.17–19]

—

“It’s a girl,” the doctor whispered, and though her heart certainly had went through an entire rollercoaster ride throughout her delivery, Lauren swore she could feel her heart stop for an entire minute.

She couldn’t believe it.

She should, because she’d been carrying the baby for nine whole months, and she’d went through the entire pain of delivering her, but she couldn’t quite believe that… that she birthed—that she birthed an entire living being, _her_ child. A human being. An individual. Her.

Lauren Sinclair, who hadn’t even learned to love someone wholly without nitpicking every single one of their flaws. Who was filled to the brim with hate, and more and more hate. Who couldn’t even accept _herself_ , of all people.

And now, an entire _child_.

Kym Ladell was not hesitant to hold back her own astonishment. “Oh my god, Lauren,” she gasped with a wide smile, laying a hand softly on her arm. She’d been there the entire time she’d been giving birth, along with William Hawkes, who was now her husband and father of the growing fetus in her belly. Lauren greatly appreciated them for being there with her during the laborious process of giving birth, especially Kym, because her normally excitable self was even more hormonal due to her own pregnancy.

She hadn’t failed to notice the way the doctors and nurses spared piteous glances at her when Kym and Will came in the delivery room instead of a husband. She tried to pay it no mind—she didn’t need anybody else, no, as long as she had her two best friends and her uncle, who had decided upon his better judgment to stay outside until the process had ended. They’d been her support system throughout the months after… after the catastrophe, followed by the victory, of their fight against the Phantom Scythe.

It took time and a whole lot of effort for her to regain a semblance of a normal life, but in those months she’d also spent a lot of time living for _herself_. Not for a goal, not for the past, only for herself and the present. In the time off from work as a police officer, she found that she was best suited as a detective regardless; she’d never liked doing things that required patience (Kym and William bore witness to the chaos she’d caused around her mansion—in her defense, she was very pregnant and moody), and preferred the thrill of catching criminals still, even with the danger it presented. Unfortunately, after her involvement with Lune, she’d been given a temporary ban from working in the APD—they’d give her a permanent one, if not for March who vouched for her, like he always did (she found out after she returned to her mansion that night that March had, indeed, been trying to help them by giving that file, and for no other intention than simply because he agreed with their ideals). Not that it mattered, anyway—she wouldn’t be able to work for the next couple of months, if not _years_ , because she’d be busy attending to her child, without a present father.

She smiled weakly at her two best friends, a stray tear falling out of the corner of her eye. They held her by her arms, helping her sit up, and the doctor handed the baby over to her as soon as they cleaned her up. “She’s beautiful,” William spoke tenderly, always the aura of poise. Kym countered it with a blunt, “And very tiny.”

Will glared at her. “Of course she’s tiny, she’s a baby, Kym.”

“I know, _Willame_. I just thought given the huge size of her belly while she was pregnant—”

“Did you think the baby would come out the shape of a watermelon, then?” he scoffed, and it brought out an airy laugh from Lauren.

“No, but—god, now I’m imagining a belly in the literal shape of a baby instead.” She made a face of disgust, and he mirrored it. Lauren managed to stop herself from imagining it, focusing on the baby instead.

“Her eyes,” Kym pointed out. “They’re—”

“Beautiful,” Lauren cut. She brushed her thumb over her eyelid. “They’re beautiful.”

She didn’t lift her head, but she knew Kym and Will were doing that thing where they look at each other and communicate in a language that only the two could understand. She didn’t really have to see them to know what they were thinking—she’d averted the topic of _him_ , again.

She didn’t do it all the time. Sometimes, she’d slip up before she even realized she was talking about him. Other days she’d go on and on about him like he was a mere memory—which he was, and yet even with time it felt like he’d gone just the day before, because every night she’d see him, again and again without fail, so vividly in her head. It didn’t help that everywhere she went, she saw _him_ —on the walls, in the streets, even among the constellations in the black expanse above they spoke of their story, their tragedy.

But most of all, it was in _her_ , the baby in her arms, that their story was really written in. No matter how much she tried to deny that, the little droplets of _blue_ staring back at her told the story by themselves, clear as crystal.

“They’re his,” Lauren said at last, her voice barely a whisper. A teardrop fell on the baby’s cheek, and the baby herself began to cry.

She wondered what Kieran White would look like if he cried. He never did, not even in his weakest, face to face against death.

Will tucked a stray dampened lock behind her ear. “What would you name her?” he asked softly.

The little girl’s wide eyes stared up at Lauren like her eyes held all the stars in the universe. _Stars_. The child truly was the brightest star to her, her guiding light. A new life for her to live, outside of everything that had been taken from her, that had taken from her.

_Nova_.

“Nova Sincla– Nova Sinclair- _White_.”

White.

A blank piece of paper.

Kieran White was the artist, not Lauren Sinclair. She would have to learn her way to draw, to paint with every single color the world had to offer.

But white wasn’t the absence of color—Lauren never had to go and find them elsewhere, not when Nova Sinclair-White already contained all the colors she would ever need in her life. And she thought for a moment, _all I have to do is not taint it with black_.

The memories of his physical drawings resurfaced in her mind, vivid as a flame. She remembered the illusory effect of hued pigments among the graphite indents of his drawings, even when he’d drawn exclusively in black and white.

She thought of her parents again, of how they’d tried to keep the evil hidden from her, believing that everything that was not under the sun didn’t exist. Maybe if she never had that belief—maybe she wouldn’t have been so harsh to Kieran the first time around, and maybe she would’ve faced half the pain she did thus far. They’d been apostles, after all—evil lurked in every corner whether you decide to heed it.

It did no avail to ignore all that was ill. Inevitably, onyx ink will splash against the pristine sheet, messing up the opus.

She would learn how to turn the blotch into a flower, and an accidental stroke into a stalk.

This was what she pleaded as she looked out the window and gazed into the night dusted with white glitter: that she’d learn to craft their art, even if it took time.

The story of Lune had ended in tragedy, but with every end comes forth a new beginning—

and so, their story lives on.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> first: i'd like to genuinely apologize for whatever reason i would need to apologize for please don’t kill me i am a mother of three kids
> 
> second i’d like to clarify: i’m not being a kieran apologist and i’m not excusing his murderous intentions (i Literally ended his life by having him murder like a dozen people)—if you ask why lauren loves him anyway, the answer is simply: love is blind, it’s unreasonable. you can’t always fall in love with those you Want to, those who are Good; you love people who you have an emotional connection with, and the sides of him that she’s seen allows her to develop that feeling. and that is the tragedy of lauki, in my opinion; that their morals will literally never allow them to be together, yet their feelings DON’T care about morals (and death literally does not care about any of these so woops). moreover this is a 90% subjective pov and we know damn well lauren is Not the Best person alive, so please don’t attack _me_ for writing what is possibly an unhealthy “relationship” (as much of a relationship you can have with someone dead). if you have any more moral arguments feel free to dm me personally okay thank you for coming to my ted talk
> 
> a very big thanks to bookswithjackie for proofreading the first four sections, and sorrysenpai for proofreading the spice!! (i am never doing that again the AGONY it put me through—for that matter i'm never being this extra again 💀 why in the world, elle, why)
> 
> title of appendix d is a reference to a song in hamilton—"death doesn't discriminate between the sinners and the saints, it takes and it takes and it takes"—which is literally my favorite quote of all time. on that note, thank you to Giggle for making me watch hamilton, hope you enjoyed this fic because yes i wrote this for you ❤️
> 
> if anything doesn’t make sense (especially in terms of what happened with the PS) it’s because i didn’t think that far when i wrote the first chapter, so i tried keeping it as vague as possible, and i’m sorry for that too :””)
> 
> now that we’re done with heavy topics and the angst that i totally did not have to write— the next chapter is just an epilogue i needed to write to ease my bittersweet heart, so it’s a beautiful ending (well, in my opinion, that is)
> 
> i hope you enjoyed this, though! thank you for reading and please do let me know what you think of this ❤️


	3. the epilogue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> this child, our magnum opus. (the story has always been inside of her.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> before i moved the epilogue to a separate chapter (because it didn’t fit the flashback format), the reference was:
>
>> _She walks towards the steps to his apartment and sits on it. Nova asks, “Uh, is it okay for us to be here?”_
>> 
>> _Lauren gives her a smile, eyes crinkling. “He’s not here, but everything inside is untouched. No one lives here now.”_
>> 
>> _“So it’s still his house, technically?” Nova takes a seat next to Lauren._
>> 
>> _She shrugs. “You could say that.”_
>> 
>> [section 3.25–28]
> 
>   
> my favorite reference, because it’s so unsuspecting, but in the end it’s the most bittersweet. enjoy! ❤️

When her mother told her that she was taking her somewhere, Nova Sinclair-White certainly hasn’t been expecting for her to be brought to her father’s old apartment.

She’s even more surprised when Lauren pulls out a key and unlocks the door, entering the apartment as though she lives there. Her first thought, for some reason, is that she stole the key or bought the key from the real estate, but when she watches her mother’s grip tighten around the doorknob even as she walks pass the doorway, she knows that her mother’s always kept the key all this time.

And while she so badly wants to ask, she herself is graced with too much knowledge as a child; she already knows, without having to ask, why Lauren has never visited the apartment—or, at least, with her. (She thinks it’s the former, anyway, judging by the way Lauren’s hawk eyes scan the room, nostalgia oozing through her gaze.)

Lauren lets go of the handle, and Nova allows herself inside. As her mother has told her a while ago, the room seems to have been devoid of occupancy for a good while, the dust collecting on top of the furniture, and floating dust particles dancing around them under the moonlight, the only source of light inside.

“So this is where the infamous Purple Hyacinth lived.”

Lauren hums in agreement. A couple of years ago, she finally told Nova about the fuller truth, about who her father really was and how he… left her mother. Nova knew enough about what went down, including all the Purple Hyacinth’s crimes, and for a while she had a hard time accepting that _he_ was the person her mother talked so—well, she never really talked about him _greatly_ , not really, but Nova didn’t really understand how anyone could… well, fall in love with such an assassin. But she supposes people are more than their crimes, and from what her mother’s told her, she knows her father had his reasons.

“There’s nothing that seem to be… personal in here,” Nova comments upon observation. _Like he never lived, even before he died._

She doesn’t say it. She doesn’t quite want to see her mother cry.

Lauren nods. “He confined his… his personal life into this one room,” she says, heading for a door. “Though for the most part, he kept it locked.”

“Is that where he draws?”

Lauren whirls back in surprise. Then, the corner of her mouth curls upward, but her eyes are a bit too off, an agonizing swirl of fondness and shredded hearts. “There’s a desk over there,” she juts her chin to its direction, “why would you assume he’d be drawing in a locked room?”

Nova shrugs, trying to maintain the eye contact with her mother’s piercing golden eyes. “I don’t know. Drawing just doesn’t sound like something an assassin would do, so I think he’d keep something like that behind locked doors, even within his own apartment.”

Her mother, too, likes to lock herself in the balcony when she needs to cry, and Nova will peek in her head from the hallway to see an empty room, but she knows better. More often than not, the howls are her lullabies as she heads to a sleep of obscure dreams with a father figure she can’t ever visualize.

“That’s a huge assumption, but I’ll give you credit for that,” Lauren says, chuckling, as she unlocks and pushes the door open.

Nova follows. “It’s not like I stated it as a _fact_ ; I did pose it as a _question_ ,” she points out, and Lauren scoffs.

“You and your father’s tongue will be the death of me.”

“Was he a good kisser?”

Lauren begins coughing violently, and Nova laughs at her misery. “Come on, mom, I’m _fifteen_ , not _five_. It’s normal for me to know of these things.”

“Yeah, but I don’t want to talk details about my amorous acts with my _daughter_ ,” Lauren retorts, making a face. “Wait—please don’t tell me you’ve—partaken in such acts.” When Nova doesn’t reply, her mother presses sternly, “Nova. What have you been up to?”

She hasn’t been up to anything, not really. (The only male figure occupying her head in her day to day life, for the time being, is her father. It’s been a while, and she doesn’t know when she’ll stop yearning to know him.) Nonetheless, she thinks it’s funny to watch the woman who was raised under conservative beliefs be so flustered, so she diverts from the topic entirely.

“Moving on!” she exclaims, and it is then she looks around the room, noticing the boxes filled with mountains of paper that climbed even up the walls. 

“Whoa, that is _a lot_ of drawings.” She gazes around the room, absorbing everything like a slow-rising sponge, mouth open in awe.

She then hears _something_ , but nothing seems to be making a sound. She dismisses it as a figment of her imagination. Her mother does not seem to hear it, saying instead, with the tenderness of a thousand thorns:

“He drew… he drew to retain whatever was left of his humanity.”

Her heart clenches, yet she forces herself to look at each of the pictures hung upon the walls. Lauren narrates as she does: “These—some were people he didn’t know, some were people he did—even if none of them knew him. Kieran always had the keenest eye for these candid expressions, and a marvellous talent of capturing it on paper so beautifully.” She chokes up in her reminiscence, but Nova—who has never even _met_ her father—feels instantly what her mother does, because she looks at each of these faces and she feels as if she’s also there, watching them as they laugh, cry, dance, fight, and _love_.

Nova gazes at the drawing of Lauren her father drew, and feels not only the way Lauren stared at him—but the way _he_ had been looking at her, behind the paper, as he sketches the image into memory—and perhaps into his heart.

And then something, _something_ seems to hit her, as sudden as having an invisible blade thrust upon her—except the feeling surges through her bloodstream just as quick, as phenomenally. She gasps, stumbling backward and hitting the boxes filled with more and more drawings of _his_.

“I have a father,” she declares, voice soft in gentle astonishment.

Her mother stands perplexed. “I’ve… been saying that. Did you think I’ve been conjuring this whole story up, or something—”

“No, no, mom,” she hushes, and in the split second silence she hears the sound again— _Aha!_ She finally identifies it as the papers rustling, brimming with life, in agreement to her epiphany. “I _have_ a father. _Alive_. He’s here, I can feel it.” She—Nova—she is crying before she knows it, the streams of tears hot against her cheeks.

Lauren’s face falls into that of sympathy and solid restraint. “Honey,” she sighs, voice cracking. “I told you… your father is gone. He’s dead.”

“ _Mom!_ ” Nova exclaims with hands outspread, for once being assertive—because she believes this too much for it to be left unsaid. “Look around you, mom! _Look!_ Can’t you—can’t you _feel_ it? Can’t you feel _him_?” She breaks into a sniffle, wiping the tears off her cheek. “He’s here, mom, he’s alive, he always has been. He’s been _here_ , all this time!” She breaks into unbelieving laughter in her eureka moment, and she grins so widely at her mother.

Lauren freezes for a moment. Then, she does as her daughter tells her to, turning her body around to face each and every drawing she could see until her eyes land back to her daughter’s.

And maybe it is easier for her to believe he is alive, because Nova Sinclair-White stands, and she looks so much like him, she could’ve been seeing _him_ instead.

Nova pulls her mother against her chest with so much force and begins racking sobs into her shirt. Lauren presses her lips against the crown of Nova’s head, willing herself to keep it all in—

but it is so hard, _so_ hard, not to break when she says “I love you, Dad,” in the most tender voice she’s ever heard. Especially because she can and will _never_ understand how her daughter, who she singularly raises, can learn to love so wholeheartedly a man she’s never met—while it took her _years_ to even accept that she loves him.

And Nova, so young yet so wise and empathetic, takes her cue to leave her mother in the room, even if _she’s_ the one who’s been dying to meet him. She even closes the door behind her when she does—

And not even a second later, Lauren is crying, crying again, crying on the base of Kieran White’s heart, clutching her chest as she chokes out strangled sobs. She is devastated, yet so in love—with the daughter, the daughter they _made_ , the daughter _they’ve_ raised. Because as much as she is a curse, an eternal reminder of what she’s lost, she is the greatest blessing they could ever have received, and Lauren will never, _ever_ trade her for the world.

This time, when she speaks, she does not scream—because she knows he is listening.

“I love you, Kieran White."

The moon smiles down a waxing crescent, and Lauren Sinclair returns it with ease.

"I love you _so damn much._ ”

Truly, the stars are benevolent to those who wishes upon them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so i broke myself with this ending because my emotions are unhinged and i cry over happy things more than i do of death :")
> 
> anyways, i hope this ending quite concludes the story well! thank you so so so much for reading, i hope you enjoyed it ehehehehe (the amount of Symbolism in here... i can't even i'm never doing this again) i would definitely appreciate if you let me know what you think by leaving kudos and comments, or you can find me in discord (@elle#2019) and instagram (@pigeonsatdawn)!
> 
> thank you once again, and hope you have a good night! 💖💖 all the love from your local writer, pigeon, cow, and recently: onion, elle <3


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